[Proposal] Add Official DENSO COBOTTA Robot Asset or URDF.Xacro → USD Conversion Guidance for Isaac Sim

[sandokim]

Proposal

Add official support for DENSO COBOTTA as a default robot asset in Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab, or alternatively provide clear, end-to-end guidance for converting the existing cobotta.urdf.xacro description into a fully usable URDF → USD asset with appropriate physical properties.

This includes documented steps or tooling for:

• Converting urdf.xacro to plain URDF
• Importing URDF into Isaac Sim
• Defining missing physical properties (mass, inertia, collision, joints)
• Exporting and validating the resulting USD asset for Isaac Lab usage

Motivation

Many institutions, including ours, actively use DENSO COBOTTA for research and deployment. While Isaac Sim provides inbuilt configurations for COBOTTA PRO 900 and 1300, the standard COBOTTA model is notably missing.

The manufacturer provides a ROS description in the form of cobotta.urdf.xacro, but:

• There is no plain URDF provided
• There is no official or practical documentation on converting this asset into a USD suitable for Isaac Sim
• The conversion process requires non-trivial expertise in ROS, URDF/Xacro, and Isaac Sim’s USD and physics pipeline
• This creates unnecessary friction for users who want to adopt Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab for real-world robot workflows and benchmarking.

In short: the lack of a default COBOTTA asset or a clear conversion path significantly raises the barrier to entry for existing COBOTTA users.

Relevant repository:

https://github.com/DENSORobot/denso_cobotta_ros/tree/master/denso_cobotta_descriptions/cobotta_description

Alternatives

• Manually converting urdf.xacro → URDF → USD using ad-hoc scripts and trial-and-error
• Using COBOTTA PRO assets as a rough substitute (not accurate in kinematics or dimensions)
• Building a custom USD model from scratch (time-consuming and error-prone)
• All alternatives are suboptimal and do not scale well for academic or industrial users.

Build Info

• Isaac Lab Version: 2.3.1
• Isaac Sim Version: 5.1.0

Additional context

• The provided file is cobotta.urdf.xacro, not a plain URDF
• There is no official Isaac Sim documentation addressing Xacro-based robot descriptions
• Clear guidance or an officially supported asset would significantly improve usability and adoption

Checklist

• I have checked that there is no similar issue in the repo (required)

Acceptance Criteria

• Official COBOTTA robot asset is available as a default USD in Isaac Sim / Isaac Lab
  OR
• Official documentation or tooling is provided to reliably convert cobotta.urdf.xacro into a physics-valid USD asset usable in Isaac Lab
• The resulting asset is validated for kinematics, joint limits, and basic physics simulation

[RandomOakForest]

Thank you for posting this proposal. The team will review it.