Hey guys, I just migrated from ROS1 to ROS2 and I am running ROS2 Humble Hawksbill with Gazebo Harmonic (ik it’s not the default installation but yeah I pulled Harmonic separately). I am working on a basic project to bring a robot present in my academia to gazebo and I noticed that there is close to no documentation about the list of sensors and how to use them in our xacro files. There is some basic introduction here. But I don’t see any list of sensors and how to use them anywhere. Does this call for creating a well-defined documentation or am I really missing any website?
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I want to chime in.
I have also did move to Humble+Harmonic and the documentation is very fragmented and impossible to easily find on google.
A huge issue is that all google indexed answers lead to https://answers.ros.org which gone AWOL, I mostly get ‘safari cannot open the page’ over last week. I think it was semi-working last week, but now completely dead.
also, supposedly answers.ros.org were migrated to https://robotics.stackexchange.com (few months ago?), but if i try to search with same terms on stackexchange as on google it does not show me pretty much any entries. so either there were not migrated or not indexed correctly
end result: documentation is completely missing
also, searching for gazebo questions on google always shows gazebo classic answers. that was the most unfortunate rename from ignition to gazebo that makes it impossible to find anything for new gazebo
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There’s definitely room for improvement, but ros-simulation/gazebo_ros_pkgs/wiki has some good info.
Edit: 
Uh, but that’s Gazebo Classic…
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Are you aware that the gz-sim repository contains a lot of demo worlds?
This is one of the primary sources of information on what exists in Gazebo Sim and how to use it.
The system plugins can be found here. Their header files typically contain documentation, for example see here for the UserCommands plugin.
For ROS 2, there are similar repositories: the examples repository and the demos.
See also this previous post where I shared some things I learned wrt. finding info on ROS / Gazebo.
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You can look at the specific documentation for the sensors library here:
https://gazebosim.org/api/sensors/9/
There are only a few tutorials unfortunately but you can also see the list of sensor source files.
(To get here you go Gazebo main site → Docs → Library reference → sensors. Google is not great for finding Gazebo/ROS2 answers in my experience, usually I get out of date answers that way).
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Thanks a lot! I didn’t look upon gz-sim github repo, my bad.
Thank you. Yes, I did see this site, which made me write
Does this call for creating a well-defined documentation
Yes, one can find examples or look at how established projects implement certain things. Or at various blog posts. This is pretty much the only ways now to find answers.
But it would be really nice to get back the google search and all accumulated searcheable knowledge of the community
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But it would be really nice to get back the google search and all accumulated searcheable knowledge of the community
I totally agree with this!
The Turtlebot4 repo has a good example of URDF.xacro files that bring up robot descriptions that include sensors. I am not sure how upto date the gazebo implementation is.
Alan, Just a month ago (Oct/24) the turtlebot_simulator jazzy branch (for UB 24.04) github (GitHub - turtlebot/turtlebot4_simulator at jazzy) was updated to ROS 2 Jazzy/gz-sim Harmonic. The readme file details the debian binary install for Harmonic gz-sim on that distribution. The Humble branch (i.e. for UB22.04) , still lists “ignition-fortress”. Ross
I’ve had a URDF + Sim Tutorial (for Gazebo Classique) sitting in PR review for over a year…
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