URDF Viewer: A robotic workcell analysis and visualization tool

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We (Black Coffee Robotics) just released urdfviewer.com

A brief background on why this tool exists:

While developing ROS2 applications for robotic arm projects, we found it was difficult to guarantee that a robot would execute a full sequence of motion without failure.

In pick-and-place applications, the challenge was reaching a pose and approaching along a defined direction. In welding or surface finishing applications, the difficulty was selecting a suitable start pose without discovering failure midway through execution.

Many early iterations involved trial and error to find a working set of joint configurations that could serve as good “seeds” for further IK and motion planning.

Over time, we built internal offline utilities to nearly guarantee that our configurations and workspace designs would work. These relied heavily on open-source libraries like TRAC-IK, along with extracting meaningful metrics such as manipulability.

Eventually, we decided to package the internal tool we were using and open it up to anyone working on robotic application setup or pre-deployment validation.

What the platform offers:

  1. Select from a list of supported robots, or upload your own. Any serial chain in standard robot_description format should work.
  2. Move the robot using interactive markers, direct joint control, or by setting a target pose. If you only need FK/IK exploration, you can stop here. The tool continuously displays end-effector pose and joint states.
  3. Insert obstacles to resemble your working scene.
  4. Create regions of interest and add orientation constraints, such as holding a glass upright or maintaining a welding direction.
  5. Run analysis to determine:
    1. Whether a single IK branch can serve the entire region
    2. Whether all poses within the region are reachable
    3. Whether the region is reachable but discontinuous in joint space

How we hope it helps users:

  • Select a suitable robot for an application by comparing results across platforms.
  • Help robotics professionals, including non-engineers, create and validate workcells early.
  • Create, share, and collaborate on scenes with colleagues or clients.

We’re planning to add much more to this tool, and we hope user feedback helps shape its future development. Give it a go!

Platform: https://urdfviewer.com/
Full announcement: URDF Viewer, A robotic workcell analysis and visualization tool
A 2 minute tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTnApgz62lA

Screenshot from 2026-02-02 15-22-02
Screenshot from 2026-02-02 15-22-02998Ă—832 139 KB

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Seems useful, is it open source ?!

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Not open source, but free to use.

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Is this based off GitHub - viser-project/viser: Web-based 3D visualization + Python? The dialogs on the right look very similar.

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Yes, that’s the base for most of front-end. we used that for robot visualization and complemented it with workcell analysis specific functionality in the back-end.

1 Like