Gazebo

The most widely used open-source robot simulator in the ROS ecosystem, maintained by Open Robotics.

Gazebo is an open-source 3D robot simulator that began in 2002 as part of the Player project, became independent in 2011 with support from Willow Garage, and has been maintained since 2012 by the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF, renamed Open Robotics in 2018) — the same organization behind ROS. It can simulate robots, cameras, lidar, IMUs, and other sensors and environments, and is commonly used to test navigation, mapping, and control code before deploying it on a real robot, as well as in competitions such as the DARPA Robotics Challenge. A rewrite that began in 2017 was branded Ignition for a while, then renamed back to Gazebo in 2022 over trademark issues, with the older codebase relabeled Gazebo Classic; Gazebo Classic stopped being maintained in January 2025. As of 2026 the current long-term-support release is Gazebo Jetty. Gazebo is oriented toward software integration testing rather than massively parallel GPU training, so reinforcement-learning work tends to use Isaac Lab, MuJoCo, or similar tools instead.

ExampleWhen building a mobile robot with ROS 2, developers commonly load the robot's URDF model and a warehouse scene into Gazebo first, get Nav2 navigation and SLAM mapping working there, and then deploy the same set of ROS nodes to the real robot.

Also called

Gazebo Classic, Gazebo Sim, Ignition Gazebo

Related

Robot Operating System · Robot Operating System 2 · Simulator · Unified Robot Description Format · Simulation Description Format (SDFormat) · ROS 2 Navigation Stack (Nav2)

Sources

Gazebo (simulator) - Wikipedia
Gazebo Docs: Getting Started

As of

2026-09