Next Tutorial: Installation
What is Gazebo Transport?
Gazebo Transport is an open source communication library that allows sharing data between clients. In our context, a client is called a node. Nodes might be running within the same process on the same machine or on separate machines located around the world. Gazebo Transport is multi-platform (Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows), so all the low level details, such as data alignment or endianness, are hidden for you.
Gazebo Transport uses Google Protocol buffers as the data type for communicating between nodes. Users can define their own messages using the Protobuf utils, and then exchange them between the nodes. Gazebo Transport discovers, serializes and delivers messages to the destinations using a combination of custom code and a middleware backend. Currently, two middleware backends are available: ZeroMQ and Zenoh.
How do I specify my middleware backend?
Gazebo Transport support an environment variable GZ_TRANSPORT_IMPLEMENTATION that allows the user to select the middleware backend to use.
zeromq is the default middleware backend and the recommended option for production code.
Please, review the Environment Variables section to learn about the environment variables that can be used with each middleware backend.
What programming language can I use with Gazebo Transport?
C++ is the native implementation and the only language that has all available library features. Python implementation is a wrapper around C++ methods using pybind11. It does not support all features like C++, but contains the main features such as publication, subscription and service request.