CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonroboticsdrake
Ittai Rubinstein
Ittai Rubinstein

Reputation: 11

Is there a way to include local SDF files in a scene YAML file for pydrake?

When working on our robotics project, we want to use a mix of local SDF files that we wrote ourselves, and ones from the pydrake / manipulation packages. All the examples of yaml files we found in the manipulation course were either of the form:

- add model:
    ...
    file: file://absolute/path/to/file.sdf
    ...

or of the following form (the Rubick's cube example even writes the SDF file to the manipulation package library to use this).

- add model:
    ...
    file: package://package_name/path/to/file.sdf
    ...

Because we are developing with our own SDF files, the former seems like a better option, but then we end up with yaml files that look like the one below which would be hard to maintain when merging versions in git.

- add model:
    ...
    file: file://absolute/path/to/project/on/my/computer/filename.sdf
    ...

Our current hack is to add a "gen_scenario_yaml.py" file that generates the yaml with the relevant absolute base paths whenever it is imported. Another alternative could be to write to the manipulation/pydrake package directories (though this would not be picked up by git). Is there a more elegant solution?

We tried setting paths of the form file://./relative/path/to/file.sdf, but this throws an error. We also have a hacky solution of generating our yaml files on the fly, which works, but isn't elegant.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 163

Answers (1)

mburgjr
mburgjr

Reputation: 1

Yes! You can do so by creating a local package for the files. First, create a package.xml file in the same folder as all your SDF files to load them in. The package.xml file should look something like this...

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<package>
  <name>PACKAGE_NAME_HERE</name>
</package>

And then you should be able to reference any SDF from that folder into your .yaml file like so...

file: package://PACKAGE_NAME_HERE/SDF_NAME_HERE.sdf

Upvotes: 0

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