N.B. This is mostly my personal opinion, don’t take it as gospel!
The key thing to consider about Gazebo, especially modern Gazebo, is that it’s not just one monolithic simulator; it’s a collection of libraries that together form a complete simulation system. While many people associate Gazebo with ROS, the reality is that Gazebo is largely ROS-agnostic. There are a number of groups out there using Gazebo without using ROS at all. What’s cool about Gazebo is that, with a little work, you can choose your own physics engine or write your own physics plugins for any scenario or application. That’s how we’ve been able to take Gazebo and tailor it to a project like the DARPA SubT challenge.
What I’d really like to see is better integration between RViz and Gazebo. My personal opinion is that Gazebo and RViz should be a unified application that runs both real and simulated robots. The dream I’ve had for a while is that a robot could walk around a room, construct a 3D map, and then use that map for simulation later. We’re slowly getting there. I would also really like to see more examples of Gazebo used for robot integration testing (basically running a Gazebo simulation with ROS as an integration test).
Fairly often, Gazebo gets dinged for not supporting reinforcement learning out of the box. Isaac Sim seems to be taking the lead in that domain. The fact is, there’s nothing preventing you from doing RL with Gazebo; people do it fairly frequently. Our problem is that we don’t have a turn-key RL example that people can just fork and use right away. I would love to see that change.
Anyway, this is a long way of saying Gazebo could always use more regular contributors. People think our team is huge, but the reality is that only a handful of people make regular contributions to the core Gazebo source code. If you want to get involved and build cool stuff like this, feel free to swing by our regular Gazebo Community Meetings!
Anyway, this is a long way of saying Gazebo could always use more regular contributors. People think our team is huge, but the reality of the situation is that only a handful of people make regular contributions to the core Gazebo source code. If you want to get involved and build cool stuff like this feel free to swing by our regular Gazebo Community Meetings!