Using SITL with Gazebo

Gazebo is a well known and respected robotics simulator which has been used in a number of robotics simulation challenges for ground, marine and space based robots, including the DARPA Robotics Challenge, DARPA Subterranean Challenge and Virtual RobotX Competition.

There are two main generations of Gazebo. To use SITL with Gazebo11 and earlier versions see the instructions for legacy versions.

This article explains how to use the latest generation of Gazebo as an external simulator for ArduPilot Rover, Coper and Plane.

Gazebo is particularly useful for defining autonomous indoor flights, swarms, non-flying vehicle types such as rovers and boats, and multi-vehicle scenarios such as the ship landing simulation in the video above.

Install ArduPilot SITL

Ensure that you have an ArduPilot development environment set up, including MAVProxy as a GCS. Verify that you can run SITL examples for Copter and Plane. The ArduPilot Development wiki has all the information required.

Install Gazebo

We currently support Gazebo Garden and Gazebo Harmonic which are available for Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal) and 22.04 (Jammy) and macOS Big Sur (11), Monterey (12), and Ventura (13).

  1. Install Gazebo following the instructions for your platform.

  2. Check that the Gazebo installation is working:

    gz sim -v4 -r shapes.sdf

This should open a world containing a variety of shapes (on macOS you will need to run the Gazebo server and client in separate terminals).

Install the ArduPilot Gazebo Plugin

These instructions can also be found in the ardupilot_gazebo/README.md

We use a standard version of ArduPilot with a custom plugin for Gazebo which is hosted on GitHub at: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot_gazebo.

Note

While Gazebo is commonly used with ROS / ROS2, the ArduPilot Gazebo plugin does not depend on ROS.

Note

The original version of the plugin located at https://github.com/khancyr/ardupilot_gazebo is compatible with the legacy versions of Gazebo.

  1. Install additional dependencies

    Ubuntu

    For Gazebo garden

    sudo apt update
sudo apt install libgz-sim7-dev rapidjson-dev
sudo apt install libopencv-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-gl

    For Gazebo Harmonic

    sudo apt update
sudo apt install libgz-sim8-dev rapidjson-dev
sudo apt install libopencv-dev libgstreamer1.0-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base1.0-dev gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad gstreamer1.0-libav gstreamer1.0-gl

    macOS

    brew update
brew install rapidjson
brew install opencv gstreamer

  2. Create a workspace folder and clone the repository

    mkdir -p gz_ws/src && cd gz_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot_gazebo

  3. Build the plugin

    Set GZ_VERSION environment variable according to installed gazebo version (replace harmonic with garden if required):

    export GZ_VERSION=harmonic
cd ardupilot_gazebo
mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo
make -j4

Configure the Gazebo environment

Gazebo uses a number of environment variables to locate plugins and models at run time. These may be set in the terminal used to run Gazebo, or set in your .bashrc or .zshrc files:

In a terminal

export GZ_SIM_SYSTEM_PLUGIN_PATH=$HOME/gz_ws/src/ardupilot_gazebo/build:$GZ_SIM_SYSTEM_PLUGIN_PATH
export GZ_SIM_RESOURCE_PATH=$HOME/gz_ws/src/ardupilot_gazebo/models:$HOME/gz_ws/src/ardupilot_gazebo/worlds:$GZ_SIM_RESOURCE_PATH

In .bashrc or .zshrc

echo 'export GZ_SIM_SYSTEM_PLUGIN_PATH=$HOME/gz_ws/src/ardupilot_gazebo/build:${GZ_SIM_SYSTEM_PLUGIN_PATH}' >> ~/.bashrc
echo 'export GZ_SIM_RESOURCE_PATH=$HOME/gz_ws/src/ardupilot_gazebo/models:$HOME/gz_ws/src/ardupilot_gazebo/worlds:${GZ_SIM_RESOURCE_PATH}' >> ~/.bashrc

Using Gazebo with ArduPilot

Two models are provided as examples with the plugin: an Iris quadcopter and a Zephyr delta-wing.

Iris quadcopter

  1. Run Gazebo

    gz sim -v4 -r iris_runway.sdf

  2. Run SITL

    sim_vehicle.py -v ArduCopter -f gazebo-iris --model JSON --map --console

  3. Arm and takeoff

    STABILIZE> mode guided
GUIDED> arm throttle
GUIDED> takeoff 5

Zephyr delta-wing

The Zephyr is positioned for vertical takeoff.

  1. Run Gazebo

    gz sim -v4 -r zephyr_runway.sdf

  2. Run SITL

    sim_vehicle.py -v ArduPlane -f gazebo-zephyr --model JSON --map --console

  3. Arm, takeoff and circle

    MANUAL> mode fbwa
FBWA> arm throttle
FBWA> rc 3 1800
FBWA> mode circle

Changing the simulation speed

By default Gazebo will attempt to run the simulation with a Real Time Factor (RTF) of 1. To increase the simulation speed add the following XML block into the world file just after the opening <world> element:

<physics name="1ms" type="ignore">
  <max_step_size>0.001</max_step_size>
  <real_time_factor>-1.0</real_time_factor>
</physics>

Then set the simulation speed-up parameter in MAVProxy

MANUAL> param set SIM_SPEEDUP 10

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