Jointly Tool Cuts CAD-to-URDF Conversion from Hours to Minutes
Forget manual joint tweaking — one upload does it all.
If you've ever built a robot in CAD and then spent hours wrangling URDF files, you know the pain: renaming mates, fixing joint axes, recreating reference frames, or starting over because the CAD came from the 'wrong' software. Sleem45 got tired of that grind and built Jointly, a tool that takes a STEP assembly and spits out a draft URDF with inferred joints, inertia data, collision meshes, and a live 3D preview. It's not fully automatic — you'll still review the result — but it collapses a multi-hour slog into a couple of minutes.
A commenter immediately raised data privacy: if a user has proprietary CAD, how are files protected? They asked about running Jointly locally. Sleem45 hasn't announced local deployment yet, but the demand is clear. For now, the web version offers a fast way to prototype and export URDFs for ROS2, Gazebo, or simulation pipelines. The tool is open for real-world testing — the developer even invites users to submit 'files that break your current exporter.' This is a practical leap for robotics engineers tired of manual URDF tooling.
- Jointly accepts STEP CAD assemblies and outputs a draft URDF with inferred joints, inertia, and collision meshes.
- Reduces URDF generation time from hours to ~2 minutes, though final review is still required.
- Community request for local execution to protect proprietary CAD files; not yet available.
Why It Matters
Streamlines robotics prototyping by eliminating the most tedious part of URDF creation.