Gazebo 1.9: xacro to urdf doesnt work [closed]

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Hello there!

I am currently developing a new robot urdf file for the latest gazebo version using xacro. (Why URDF and not SDF you might ask? We are using ROS alot...)

When I try to convert the xacro files to urdf with the command

rosrun xacro xacro.py myrobot.urdf.xacro > test.urdf

I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/opt/ros/hydro/share/xacro/xacro.py", line 60, in <module> xacro.main() File "/opt/ros/hydro/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/xacro/__init__.py", line 601, in main output.write(doc.toprettyxml(indent=' ')) UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xfc' in position 529: ordinal not in range(128)

I looked that error message up, it looks as it is a problem with the xacro files beeing encoded in UTF-8, and python trying to write in ASCII. Now what I do NOT understand is, why other xacro files that come with some ROS-packages work fine and I get a resulting urdf file...

Here is my code:

robot.urdf.xacro (includes all desired parts of my robot):

<?xml version="1.0"?> 
<robot name="myrobot" xmlns:xacro="URL 2 Xacro">
      <!-- common parameters for the model-->
      <include filename="$(find myrobot_description)/urdf/common.urdf.xacro" />

      <!-- base chasis-->
      <include filename="$(find myrobot_description)/urdf/base/base.urdf.xacro" />
</robot>

common.urdf.xacro (just contains parameters):

<robot>
     <property name="M_PI" value="3.1415926535897931" />

     <!-- Main Body-base-->
     <property name="base_x_com" value="-0.08748000" />
     <property name="base_y_com" value="-0.00085000" />
     <property name="base_z_com" value="0.09947000" />
     .
     . 
     .
</robot>

base.urdf.xacro (description of base chasis, 2 links and 1 joint):

<robot>
  <link name="link1">
  <inertial>
    <mass value="0.0001" />
    <origin xyz="0 0 0" />
    <inertia ixx="0.0001" ixy="0.0" ixz="0.0"
             iyy="0.0001" iyz="0.0" izz="0.0001" />
  </inertial>

  <visual>
    <origin xyz="0 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
    <geometry>
        <box size="0.001 0.001 0.001" />
    </geometry>
  </visual>
  </link>     

  <link name="link2">
  <inertial>
    <mass value="0.0001" />
    <origin xyz="0 0 0" />
    <inertia ixx="0.0001" ixy="0.0" ixz="0.0"
             iyy="0.0001" iyz="0.0" izz="0.0001" />
  </inertial>

  <visual>
    <origin xyz="0 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
    <geometry>
        <box size="0.001 0.001 0.001" />
    </geometry>
  </visual>
  </link>   

  <joint name="link1_link2_joint" type="fixed">
    <origin xyz="0 0 0" rpy="0 0 0" />
    <parent link="link1"/>
    <child link="link2" />
  </joint>
</robot>

What can I do to fix the parser error? There are no strange things in my urdf code....

Thanks for your help

best regards

psei