urdf_scene_nicegui is a minimal Python3 package to load URDF files in the awesome UI framweork NiceGUI for web-based UIs in Python. This allows to quickly visualize robots and machine tools in NiceGUI and even animate them (e.g., sync with real axis values from machine).

Besides nicegui, the only external dependency is urchin (a maintained fork of urdfpy) for easier loading the URDFs (Could probably be replaced by native XML parsing). Feel free to inspect the requirements.txt file.

Due to its early developing stage it is not on pypi. You have to install it manually:

# Directly install from github:
pip install git+https://github.com/chhinze/urdf_scene_nicegui.git@main


# Alternative: Clone the repository, then install:
# on some platforms you have to call pip3 instead
pip install .

# if you want to modify the source after installing
pip install -e .

# minimal example

from nicegui import ui
scene = UrdfScene(os.path.join(script_dir, "path/to/your.urdf"))
scene.show(material="#888", scale_stls=1, background_color='#004191')
ui.run()

Or see examples/ folder.

• Implement basic functionality
• Add coordinate systems at end links
• Make meshes scalable
• Implement axis animation (recursive with scene.group())
• Retreive axes limits
• Support additional mesh formats (needs nicegui extensions or on-the-fly conversion)
• Respect colors/transparencies
• Support more joint types (e.g. free joint for mobile robotics)