Gazebo Sim : A Robotic Simulator

Maintainer: michael AT openrobotics DOT org

Build	Status
Test coverage
Ubuntu Jammy
Homebrew
Windows

Gazebo Sim is an open source robotics simulator. Through Gazebo Sim, users have access to high fidelity physics, rendering, and sensor models. Additionally, users and developers have multiple points of entry to simulation including a graphical user interface, plugins, and asynchronous message passing and services.

Gazebo Sim is derived from Gazebo Classic and represents over 16 years of development and experience in robotics and simulation. This library is part of the Gazebo project.

Table of Contents

Features

Install

Usage

Documentation

Testing

Folder Structure

Code of Conduct

Contributing

Versioning

License

Features

• Dynamics simulation: Access multiple high-performance physics engines through Gazebo Physics.

• Advanced 3D graphics: Through Gazebo Rendering, it's possible to use rendering engines such as OGRE v2 for realistic rendering of environments with high-quality lighting, shadows, and textures.

• Sensors and noise models: Generate sensor data, optionally with noise, from laser range finders, 2D/3D cameras, Kinect style sensors, contact sensors, force-torque, IMU, GPS, and more, all powered by Gazebo Sensors

• Plugins: Develop custom plugins for robot, sensor, and environment control.

• Graphical interface: Create, introspect and interact with your simulations through plugin-based graphical interfaces powered by Gazebo GUI.

• Simulation models: Access numerous robots including PR2, Pioneer2 DX, iRobot Create, and TurtleBot, and construct environments using other physically accurate models available through Gazebo Fuel. You can also build a new model using SDF.

• TCP/IP Transport: Run simulation on remote servers and interface to Gazebo Sim through socket-based message passing using Gazebo Transport.

• Command line tools: Extensive command line tools for increased simulation introspection and control.

Install

See the installation tutorial.

Usage

Gazebo Sim can be run from the command line, once installed, using:

gz sim

For help, and command line options use:

gz sim -h

Known issue of command line tools

In the event that the installation is a mix of Debian and from source, command line tools from gz-tools may not work correctly.

A workaround for a single package is to define the environment variable GZ_CONFIG_PATH to point to the location of the Gazebo library installation, where the YAML file for the package is found, such as

export GZ_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/share/gz

However, that environment variable only takes a single path, which means if the installations from source are in different locations, only one can be specified.

Another workaround for working with multiple Gazebo libraries on the command line is using symbolic links to each library's YAML file.

mkdir ~/.gz/tools/configs -p
cd ~/.gz/tools/configs/
ln -s /usr/local/share/gz/fuel8.yaml .
ln -s /usr/local/share/gz/transport13.yaml .
ln -s /usr/local/share/gz/transportlog13.yaml .
...
export GZ_CONFIG_PATH=$HOME/.gz/tools/configs

This issue is tracked here.

Documentation

See the installation tutorial.

Testing

See the installation tutorial.

See the Writing Tests section of the contributor guide for help creating or modifying tests.

Folder Structure

Refer to the following table for information about important directories and files in this repository.

gz-sim
├── examples                     Various examples that can be run against binary or source installs of gz-sim.
│   ├── plugin                   Example plugins.
│   ├── standalone               Example standalone programs that use gz-sim as a library.
│   └── worlds                   Example SDF world files.
├── include/gz/sim               Header files that downstream users are expected to use.
│   └── detail                   Header files that are not intended for downstream use, mainly template implementations.
├── python                       Python wrappers
├── src                          Source files and unit tests.
│   ├── gui                      Graphical interface source code.
│   └── systems                  System source code.
├── test
│   ├── integration              Integration tests.
│   ├── performance              Performance tests.
│   ├── plugins                  Plugins used in tests.
│   ├── regression               Regression tests.
│   └── tutorials                Tutorials, written in markdown.
├── Changelog.md                 Changelog.
├── CMakeLists.txt               CMake build script.
├── Migration.md                 Migration guide.
└── README.md                    This readme.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md.

Code of Conduct

Please see CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.

Versioning

This library uses Semantic Versioning. Additionally, this library is part of the Gazebo project which periodically releases a versioned set of compatible and complimentary libraries. See the Gazebo website for version and release information.

License

This library is licensed under Apache 2.0. See also the LICENSE file.