Beyond URDF: The Universal Robot Description Directory for Shared, Extensible, and Standardized Robot Models

TL;DR

The paper introduces URDD, a modular, standardized format for robot models that enhances data richness, reduces redundancy, and facilitates sharing across robotics applications through an open-source toolkit and visualization tools.

Contribution

It presents URDD, a novel structured format and toolkit that automatically generates rich, standardized robot descriptions from existing files, improving interoperability and data reuse.

Findings

URDD can be generated efficiently from existing robot models.

URDD encapsulates richer information than traditional specification files.

URDD enables construction of core robotics subroutines.

Abstract

Robots are typically described in software by specification files (e.g., URDF, SDF, MJCF, USD) that encode only basic kinematic, dynamic, and geometric information. As a result, downstream applications such as simulation, planning, and control must repeatedly re-derive richer data, leading to redundant computations, fragmented implementations, and limited standardization. In this work, we introduce the Universal Robot Description Directory (URDD), a modular representation that organizes derived robot information into structured, easy-to-parse JSON and YAML modules. Our open-source toolkit automatically generates URDDs from URDFs, with a Rust implementation supporting Bevy-based visualization. Additionally, we provide a JavaScript/Three.js viewer for web-based inspection of URDDs. Experiments on multiple robot platforms show that URDDs can be generated efficiently, encapsulate substantially richer information than standard specification files, and directly enable the construction of core robotics subroutines. URDD provides a unified, extensible resource for reducing redundancy and establishing shared standards across robotics frameworks. We conclude with a discussion on the limitations and implications of our work.