Acropolis has reached end-of-life on September 2019. This page exists for archival purposes. Please refer to the latest supported version.

ROS Integration

Most of the Gazebo libraries use Gazebo Transport to exchange data between different software components. This tutorial details how to interface with ROS, enabling the ability to use tools such as Rviz for robot or sensor visualization.

ros1_gz_bridge to the rescue

ros1_gz_bridge provides a network bridge which enables the exchange of messages between ROS 1 and Gazebo Transport. Its support is limited to only certain message types. Please, read this README to verify if your message type is supported by the bridge.

How to install ros1_gz_bridge

Binary install

Not available yet.

Source install

See the prerequisites and install section of the bridge documentation. This tutorial requires Ubuntu Melodic or newer.

Assuming that you have ROS Melodic, you can install all dependencies with:

sudo apt install ros-melodic-desktop ros-melodic-rqt-image-view libignition-common3-dev libignition-transport6-dev

Run the bridge and exchange images

In this example, we’re going to generate Gazebo Transport images using Gazebo, that will be converted into ROS 1 images, and visualized with rqt_viewer.

First we start a ROS 1 roscore:

# Shell A:
. /opt/ros/melodic/setup.bash
roscore

Then we start Gazebo.

# Shell B:
gz sim -r -f camera_sensor.sdf

Gazebo should be running and publishing images over the /camera topic. Let’s verify it:

# Shell C:
gz topic -l | grep "^/camera"
/camera

Then we start the parameter bridge with the previous topic.

# Shell D:
. ~/bridge_ws/install/setup.bash
rosrun ros1_gz_bridge parameter_bridge /camera@sensor_msgs/Image@ignition.msgs.Image

Now we start the ROS 1 GUI:

# Shell E:
. /opt/ros/melodic/setup.bash
rqt_image_view /camera

You should see the current images in rqt_image_view which are coming from Gazebo (published as Gazebo Msgs over Gazebo Transport).

The screenshot shows all the shell windows and their expected content (it was taken using ROS Melodic):