Gazebo URDF deprecated?

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HI all,

today I installed the newest version of Gazebo... (Ubuntu 12.04, 64-bit). Trying to get the Shadow-hand running in Fuerte. My problem with broken ContactSensor is still there, but Gazebo now greets all my launch files with an error message about urdf files being not only deprecated but being rejected after 1/July/2012. Gazebo tells me to try some tool called "gzsdf" to fix this.

In my opinion, this is not good. Not good at all, rather a critical bug.

You will have your reasons, and of course SDF has some advantages like allowing parallel-linkages and such. But after all, Gazebo is now the "official" robot simulator of WillowGarage, and urdf is the "official" description of all non-trivial robots out there. Why drop this, and why require all users to come up with a second separate description for robot simulation?

Even if Gazebo has problems with its "parser_deprecated.cc" stuff: If the "gzsdf" tool actually works, there is no reason to not just silently call gzsdf on user-supplied xacro/urdf files, and everything works as before.

If gzsdf does NOT work, all the complex urdf robot-descriptions created by ROS users are now BROKEN in Gazebo: do you/we (Gazebo developers) actually want that?

I tried running a few of my xacro files through the process:

• rosrun xacro xacro.py foo.urdf.xacro > foo.urdf (xacro -> urdf)
• rosrun gazebo urdf2model -f foo.urdf -o foo.xml (urdf -> old Gazebo sdf)
• rosrun gazebo gzsdf print foo.xml > foo.sdf (old Gazebo -> new sdf)

and it is pretty annoying, as well as removing the nice hierarchical structure from the xacro files. It can't even be put on one command line, because all the converters insist on their particular calling conventions.

TODO:

1. reinstate support for URDF in Gazebo (best!)
2. provide xacro2sdf tool (but what do we gain over a fixed/updated parser_deprecated.cc?)

Feedback and explations very welcome, Cheers, Norman