Exporting Robot Description Files from Onshape

Setting up Onshape developer key

Get API key from the Onshape Developer Portal

App Store - Onshape

When creating the key, make sure that at least “Application can read your documents” is selected.

export the key as environment variable

export ONSHAPE_API=https://cad.onshape.com
export ONSHAPE_ACCESS_KEY=Your_Access_Key
export ONSHAPE_SECRET_KEY=Your_Secret_Key

Install Isaac Lab < 2.0.0

At the time of writing (2025 March), the USD export function of Isaac Lab ≥ 2.0.0 seems to be broken. To use the URDF to USD converter, we need to use an older version of Isaac Lab release. After some testing, Isaac Lab 1.4.0 seems to be a good choice.

The procedure is similar to the normal Isaac Lab install. The only difference is that for Isaac Sim, we need to install an older version, Isaac Sim == 4.2.0.2.

conda create -yn isaaclab-1.4.0 python=3.10
conda activate isaaclab-1.4.0

pip install isaacsim==4.2.0.2 isaacsim-extscache-physics==4.2.0.2 isaacsim-extscache-kit==4.2.0.2 isaacsim-extscache-kit-sdk==4.2.0.2 --extra-index-url https://pypi.nvidia.com

Additionally, there is an issue on finding the correct RSL_RL repository during Isaac Lab installation in this version. Since we will not use this Isaac Lab install to do any training, we can comment out the dependency in source/extensions/omni.isaac.lab_tasks/setup.py.

setup.py

  # Extra dependencies for RL agents
  EXTRAS_REQUIRE = {
      "sb3": ["stable-baselines3>=2.1"],
      "skrl": ["skrl>=1.3.0"],
      "rl-games": ["rl-games==1.6.1", "gym"],  # rl-games still needs gym :(
-     "rsl-rl": ["rsl-rl@git+https://github.com/leggedrobotics/rsl_rl.git"],
+     # "rsl-rl": ["rsl-rl@git+https://github.com/leggedrobotics/rsl_rl.git"],
      "robomimic": [],
  }
  # Add the names with hyphens as aliases for convenience
  EXTRAS_REQUIRE["rl_games"] = EXTRAS_REQUIRE["rl-games"]
- EXTRAS_REQUIRE["rsl_rl"] = EXTRAS_REQUIRE["rsl-rl"]
+ # EXTRAS_REQUIRE["rsl_rl"] = EXTRAS_REQUIRE["rsl-rl"]

Install onshape-to-robot

Follow the guide from onshape-to-robot.

The rest should be pretty straight forward.