What's the current state of SDF / URDF best-practices? There seems to be a lot of misinformation out there, and I'm trying to understand what the most reasonable way of doing things is.
Specifically, we'd like to generate a single robot description of some type in xacro and generate a URDF for ROS and a SDF for gazebo. There are tools to write the urdf from xacro and convert to sdf, but the resulting sdf files seem buggy-- the process of lumping fixed joints usually screws up sensor poses.
Here's a bunch of questions. I'll take whatever answers we get:
1). Is it possible / advisable / whatever to use xacro to write SDF files? Has anybody tried this? xacro seems like a sufficiently generic tool.
2). Is there an sdf to urdf conversion tool? There seems to be some work out there, but nothing that's been driven to completion:
https://bitbucket.org/osrf/sdformat/issues/135/support-sdf-to-urdf-conversion
https://bitbucket.org/osrf/sdformat/branch/sdf_to_urdf
3). Poses of tags inside blocks in a URDF that reference a linked connected to the robot model through nested fixed joints don't seem to be properly computed-- at least under whatever version of gazebo / sdf included in ROS kinetic. Is there a solution to this?
There seem to be a lot of paths forward to get a combined SDF / URDF setup, but they all either have one little bug or involve ugly hacks. Am I missing something, or is this just the current state of affairs?
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