Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-06-22

Gazebo Gazebo PMC
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Hi Gazebo Community!

This week’s meeting was held on 2026-06-22T18:00:00Z and the following is a summary:

PMC Business

  • None

New agenda items

  • OSRA 2026 Funding Proposals: Reminded the team that funding proposals are due 2026-06-30T00:00:00Z (with an internal draft deadline of 2026-06-29T00:00:00Z). Planned proposals include a documentation revamp, a canonical demos/examples project (coordinating with the ROS PMC), a CI project, and a new proposal to experiment with replacing or supplementing Homebrew with pixi in CI.
  • Supplemental PR Documentation: Discussed an experiment using AI-generated interactive HTML pages to supplement pull requests (such as gz-rendering#1303) with visualizations. The team agreed that while useful for context, all critical review details must remain within the GitHub PR itself to avoid overwhelming reviewers.
  • Vulkan Support and Rendering Parallelization: Discussed enabling Vulkan by default on Rotary to leverage modern rendering API benefits. Currently, Vulkan support is missing from Ogre 2.3 due to a build-time regression, and past experiments faced mesh/texture loading issues. Upgrading to Ogre 3.0 is being considered to help resolve these issues. Additionally, process fan-out using shared memory and flat buffers is being discussed to bypass single-threaded rendering bottlenecks.

Updates

Package Updates

  • MuJoCo Physics Integration (Discussed): Presented benchmarks of a MuJoCo physics system integration directly on the ECS (gz-sim#3690), showing up to a 40% speedup. The migration to MuJoCo as a system and removal of the gz-physics API has been deferred until a sufficient abstraction layer is developed.
  • STL and COLLADA Loader Performance (Discussed): Merged and backported custom ASCII STL loader performance improvements, and three COLLADA loader performance PRs are ready for review (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 - Rotary).
  • Other Package Updates: Protobuf Arena allocation was merged and backported across active distributions to improve publisher system performance. In-progress updates include Ogre rendering optimizations to reduce CPU usage and GPU-to-CPU copies (gz-rendering#1302, gz-rendering#1303), and packaging MuJoCo as a custom .deb (mujoco-release). (Note: Ogre and MuJoCo packaging updates were not discussed due to lack of time)

Infrastructure & Buildfarm

  • Buildfarm: Stable with no major issues; monitoring one flaky test (buildfarm-tools#255).
  • CI Upgrades & Fixes: Upgrades to Ubuntu 26.04 (Rotary) and 24.04 (Harmonic) PR CI are pending Terraform updates for branch protection. Various test fixes were merged, and recurring GitHub 504 errors are under investigation. (Note: CI upgrades and fixes were not discussed due to lack of time)
  • Terraform & Packaging: Initial PR for managing Gazebo repositories via Terraform is in place (terraform_github_repos#1), and a PR to import Fortress packages to the ROS 2 repository is merged (reprepro-updater#261). (Note: These items were not discussed due to lack of time)

Security & Documentation

  • Jenkins & Support Windows: Preparing a Jenkins security upgrade (core, plugins, and build timeout). PRs are in progress to extend Gazebo support windows to match ROS support windows (docs#670, docs#698). (Note: These items were not discussed due to time constraints)

As always, the meeting notes are available at :classical_building: Gazebo PMC meeting weekly agenda - Google Docs.

The next Gazebo PMC meeting will be on 2026-06-29T18:00:00Z
(See Open Source Robotics Foundation official events)