Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-09-28

Gazebo Gazebo PMC
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Hi Gazebo Community!

This week’s meeting was held on 2026-09-28T18:00:00Z and the following is a summary:

PMC Business

  • Formal Decision: Accepted REP-158: OpenUSD Conventions for Simulation Asset Interoperability in Open Source Robotics. This was a joint vote with the ROS PMC, and the final results will be announced once officially recorded by both PMCs.
  • A formal vote will be requested to sponsor Cherie Hu as a mentee committer. She has made significant contributions to gz-common.

New agenda items

  • ROSCon 2026 Debrief
    • Simulator Landscape & Value Proposition: Following widespread momentum around MuJoCo at ROSCon (including direct use with mujoco_ros2_control and the unveiling of a new renderer), the PMC discussed how to clearly articulate Gazebo’s core value propositions. Key strengths highlighted include ease of use, flexibility, not strictly requiring a GPU, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) and integration testing, mixed kinematic/dynamic simulation modes, first-class Fuel integration, and the ability to start in Gazebo and export to other simulators via file format converters.
    • macOS & Onboarding Feedback: Feedback from the intro workshop and hackathon emphasized making it easier to get started with Gazebo and investing in first-class macOS support for both Gazebo and ROS—especially with Pixi coming online, as Homebrew currently lacks full ROS integration and many attendees used Mac laptops.
    • Zero-Copy Sensor Data Transport: Inspired by ROSCon sessions on zero-copy rcl_buffer image transport, the team discussed using rcl_buffer with ROS messages to efficiently expose sensor data from Gazebo to ROS without conversion overhead, with ros_gz_pointcloud noted as a prime candidate for integration.
    • Hackathon & Future Events: The ROSCon hackathon was a big success, with participants building Gazebo from source and reviewing pull requests. The team discussed organizing co-located meetings and hackathons at future robotics conferences (such as RSS), noting that hackathons require less preparation overhead than workshops while still being effective for onboarding contributors.
  • Speeding Up Compilations & Conditional CI Execution
    • Discussed skipping unnecessary CI builds when pull requests only modify documentation or text files (gazebo-tooling/release-tools#1558).
    • Evaluated moving file-ignore and dependency-graph logic into gzdev to intelligently determine which CI builds and tests need to run (accounting for Python bindings and world file changes). While a script in release-tools provides an immediate cross-platform fix, prototype dependency-graph tooling has already shown a noticeable reduction in CI runs and will be evaluated further.
    • Agreed to enable a Jenkins configuration requiring manual approval before running CI on pull requests from new contributors (similar to GitHub Actions) to prevent queue congestion from bulk/automated pull requests.

Updates

Buildfarm & CI (Discussed Live)

  • Ubuntu Resolute Ogre 1 CMake Warnings: gz-sensors CI fails to find gz-rendering-ogre 11.0.0 on Ubuntu Resolute (gazebosim/gz-rendering#1346) because Ogre 1 components are no longer built in nightlies. Discussion is ongoing in gazebosim/gz-cmake#587 on how to specify components that are required for CI vs. optional for end users without masking silent CI failures.
  • macOS Sequoia ARM64 GUI Test Failures: gz-gui10 Homebrew tests on mac-six-arm are failing with SIGTRAP when using Qt Metal (gazebosim/gz-gui#790), likely due to XQuartz not running, permission issues, or outdated Xcode CLI tools. The team plans to inspect an idle Jenkins workspace on the host machine.
  • Windows Flaky Stopwatch Test: The re-opened Stopwatch.StartStopReset test failure on Windows (gazebosim/gz-math#95) is occurring roughly every 20–30 builds and may require backporting gazebosim/gz-math#610.

Note: The following updates were shared as written updates in the meeting agenda and were not discussed live due to time constraints.

URDF & SDFormat

  • Delivered a ROSCon presentation on URDF 1.1 / 1.2.
  • In progress:
    • Support URDF 1.1 capsules in SDFormat (gazebosim/sdformat#1722).
    • Opened a tracking issue to discuss closed-loop kinematics in URDF (ros/urdfdom#267).
    • Noted that the urdfdom version in bazel-central-registry is outdated.

Package Updates (gz-sim, gz-physics, gz-rendering, gz-gui, gz-transport)

Packaging, Release Tools & Documentation

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 2026-10-05T18:00:00Z
(See Open Source Robotics Foundation official events)

ROS News for the week of September 28th, 2026
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This could be potentially interesting if you have a sensor rendered in GPU/CUDA that could directly be used in a ROS node with no transfer overhead. Would have to think about the actual implementation, though.

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I’m afraid that would need a similar mechanism to rcl:: buffer also in Gazebo… But in general, I really like the idea.