Add support to new version of Gazebo (formerly known as Ignition)

[padhupradheep]

Open Robotics have already launched the successor to Gazebo named as ignition. It would benefit the community to build, develop plugins based on our robots!

[padhupradheep]

https://ignitionrobotics.org/docs/citadel/comparison Time to move towards Ignition Gazebo.

Why do we need to move to Ignition ? Here is a nice post on Gazebo Discourse

[padhupradheep]

Initial work can be found in this branch https://github.com/neobotix/neo_simulation2/tree/fortress-migration

Waiting for issue gazebosim/gz-sim#1672 (comment) to be fixed by open robotics for moving further

[padhupradheep]

The issue specified above is fixed. Need to give a full throttle to get the package up.

[padhupradheep]

Towards the first release:

• robot (MPO-700)
• robot state publisher
• world (AWS World)
• laser scanners
• navigation 2 setup

[azeey]

Any progress on this?
As you may know, Gazebo-classic (aka Gazebo11, see Terminology) is no longer being actively developed and will not be available on ROS Jazzy (REP 2000).
These might be helpful resources if you weren't aware:

• Migration guide for SDF files: https://gazebosim.org/api/sim/8/migrationsdf.html
• Migration guild for Gazebo plugins: https://gazebosim.org/api/sim/8/migrationplugins.html
• Documentation for ros_gz: https://gazebosim.org/docs/harmonic/ros2_integration.
• https://github.com/gazebosim/ros_gz_project_template and its documentation.

[padhupradheep]

Hey @azeey

First of all sorry for the late response, was out on vacation. On behalf of everyone from our team, we wish you and your team a fantastic 2024.

As far as with the progress. We are almost done with the initial migration. We are well aware about the Gazebo 11 and we hope to make the first release of new version soon.

We have hit a bump currently with the new world that we created for the modern Gazebo setup. The real time factor is oscillating from 0.78 - 0.9. As you can see in the fortress migration branch, we have 2 worlds, namely:

• neo_workshop.sdf
• neo_workshop_empty.sdf

neo_workshop.sdf has some simulated cardboard boxes and the other one has just the walls without the cardboard boxes. Apparently, the RTF in the later is around 0.99 whereas for the former, it is oscillating as mentioned above. I suspect it's somehow related to the boxes that we created. I'd probably open a question in the robot stack exchange forum, if we couldn't figure it out. (Edit: Could be also because of the GPU lidar, gazebosim/ros_gz#368)

Apart from this, everything else seems to work as expected. Thank you for following up.

[azeey]

Thanks for the update! We are aware of the GPU lidar issue and planning to improve it's performance. In the meantime, you could set the rending Sensors system to use ogre.