Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-09-14

Gazebo Gazebo PMC
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Hi Gazebo Community!

We didn’t have a meeting last week (2026-09-07T00:00:00Z) because it was a US holiday and most people couldn’t attend.

This week’s meeting was held on 2026-09-14T18:00:00Z and the following is a summary:

PMC Business

  • REP-158 Vote: A call for vote has been issued to move REP-158 (OpenUSD conventions for robotics) from Draft to Approved. Advancing the proposal requires a 50% approval quorum across both the ROS and Gazebo PMCs, with a simple majority determining the outcome. An asynchronous vote is scheduled to conclude by Friday, 2026-09-18T00:00:00Z, ahead of ROSCon.

New agenda items

  • Evaluation of Assimp Model Loader in gz-common: Discussed replacing the custom STL loader with Assimp in gz-common (gz-common#845). Benchmarks showed that Assimp is roughly 2x slower for STL meshes and 3.5x slower than tinyobjloader for OBJ meshes. Decision: Keep the existing lightweight custom STL loader and tinyobjloader.
  • Name the Next Gazebo Release (Gazebo-M): This is the final week to vote for the name of the next Gazebo release here. Voting closes this Friday, 2026-09-18T00:00:00Z.
  • Gazebo Office Hours: Gazebo office hours will be combined with ROS office hours, but will not be held this Friday; the next event and schedule will be announced at ROSCon.
  • Deprecation of 32-bit ARM (armhf): Plans were presented to deprecate 32-bit ARM binary builds across all distributions on the buildfarm (release-tools#1548). Given that modern ARM hardware (such as Raspberry Pi and Jetson) supports 64-bit (arm64), dropping 32-bit binaries will significantly reduce multi-architecture build and maintenance overhead. An announcement will be posted on Discourse for a 10-day community review period prior to removal.
  • Gazebo Release Dashboard: A new Gazebo Release Dashboard was demonstrated for tracking library release statuses and packaging dependencies across platforms (including Conda and Debian). The dashboard is being considered for official adoption and will be migrated to a dedicated repository.

Updates

Discussed Updates

Infrastructure & Buildfarm

  • Homebrew 7.0.0 and macOS Updates: Homebrew 7.0.0 was released, breaking the homebrew-zenoh tap and causing CI failures in gz-transport (gz-transport#963, upstream issue homebrew-zenoh#22, PR homebrew-zenoh#23). A fork will be used if upstream review is delayed. Furthermore, the new test sandbox in Homebrew 7.0.0 breaks gz-rendering and gz-gui tests (homebrew-simulation#3571), requiring formulae updates before building bottles. Support for Intel CPUs and macOS Sonoma has been dropped, and new macOS buildfarm machines are being prepared.
  • Intermittent Test Failure: An intermittent failure in ThrusterTest.AngVelCmdControl on Ubuntu Resolute is under investigation (gz-sim#3983).

Transport & Performance

  • gz-transport & Zenoh Integration: Merged the second part of Zenoh 1.8.0 integration for Rotary (gz-transport#868). Zenoh 1.7.2 is now the new minimum requirement (bumped from 1.5.0), while releasing Zenoh 1.8.0 into our main apt repository is required for backporting the gz-transport PR to released branches. Resolved an issue where intra-process publishers and subscribers combined with a remote subscriber resulted in duplicate messages, by ensuring Zenoh publications are only delivered to external sessions (Rotary PR #961, Jetty PR #965). Additionally, an upstream Zenoh concurrency issue causing test failures during parallel Bazel runs with shared memory enabled has been reproduced and is being patched (gz-transport#964).
  • Rendering & Sensors Camera Optimization: A memory optimization in gz-sensors (gz-sensors#655) allows rendering directly into reused image message payloads provided by gz-rendering, resulting in an ~15% performance boost for high-resolution RGB cameras.
  • CMake MSVC Debug Format: Ready for review: gz-cmake#586 leaves the MSVC debug information format to CMake rather than hardcoding /Zi (which breaks ccache without providing effective release debug symbols). Switching to Ninja improves test execution times by 15–20%.
  • ROSCon Performance Metrics: Profiling and benchmarks comparing the original Jetty release with main are underway in preparation for an upcoming ROSCon talk.

Written Updates

The following items were provided as written updates in the agenda but were not discussed live due to time constraints:

Package Updates

  • gz-sim:
    • Renamed Server::Ecm to Server::EcmScope and added usage examples (gz-sim#3964, merged).
    • Ready for review: Exposing ECS components and ECM operations to Python (gz-sim#3957).
  • gz-physics (MuJoCo):
    • Added support for ConstructSdfCollision, enabling contact visualization in gz-sim (gz-physics#1055, merged).
    • Implemented joint velocity commands (gz-physics#1004, merged).
    • Ready for review: Implementation of GetJointTransmittedWrench (gz-physics#1059).
  • gz_vendor:
    • Enabled Python bindings in older versions of ROS vendor packages (gz_vendor#2).

Infrastructure & CI

  • Rotary Distribution Updates:
    • Dropped Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble) support for Rotary: Jenkins stable branch CI is disabled, nightly builds are stopped, and gz-sim GitHub workflows have dropped 24.04, with other packages to follow (release-tools#1515).
    • Dropped freeimage and ogre1.9 dependencies in nightly builds. A resulting gz-sensors CMake warning is addressed in gz-cmake#587.
  • GitHub Branch Protection: Migrated Jetty branches from Noble to Resolute in GitHub repository protections (terraform_github_repos#8).
  • Bazel Central Registry (BCR): Updated BCR maintainers across all Gazebo packages supporting Bazel.
  • AWS RDS Deprecation: Stopped legacy database instances: gazebosim (which previously served api.ignitionrobotics.org, now returning 503) and ign-test-db. Production and staging fuel databases (gz-fuel-production and gz-fuel-staging) remain available.

Documentation

  • Updated guidelines for choosing a base branch (docs#713, merged).

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 2026-09-21T18:00:00Z
(See Open Source Robotics Foundation official events)

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ROS News for the week of September 14th, 2026
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Is the office hours combination going to be an ongoing thing?

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Yes, the plan is to do the office hours together. We could do break out rooms if we have too many people. @mjcarroll suggested this, and I think it’s a good idea.

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We also discussed that it’s probably better to use our resources to spread office hours in time rather than in topic. This is so we can have an EMEA/North America office hours and an APAC/North America office hours without spreading the team too thin.

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I love everything about this, especially the increase in TZ coverage.