Gazebo Roadmap#

This page describes planned work for Gazebo. The set of planned features and development efforts should provide insight into the overall direction of Gazebo. If you would like to see other features on the roadmap, then please get in touch with us at info@openrobotics.org.

Gazebo Kura Roadmap#

Coming soon…

Gazebo Kura Release Timeline (2026)#

This is a tentative release timeline for the next Gazebo release.

Event / Period

Date

Duration

Primary Focus

Feature Freeze

Friday, June 26

~1 month

Stabilize new features, merge pre-existing PRs.

Code Freeze

Monday, July 27

~1 month

Bug fixes only.

Tutorial Party

July 29 - August 13

2.5 Weeks

Community testing, tutorial verification.

Internal QA/Demo Prep

August 17 - 21

1 Week

Final package releases and feature demo preparation.

Community Meeting

Wednesday, August 26

N/A

Feature showcase.

Official Announcement

Monday, August 31

N/A

Release day!

Detailed Release Phase Guidelines#

Feature Freeze#

During the feature freeze period, we will not accept new feature pull requests to Gazebo. This includes new features to the upcoming release as well as to currently stable versions. The focus will be reviewing open pull requests that are likely to be merged before the code freeze starts. If you have a new feature you want to contribute, please open a PR before we go into feature freeze noting that changes can be made to open pull requests during the feature freeze period.

  • Initial Two-Week Review Period: For the first two weeks following the feature freeze date, all branches remain frozen to new-feature pull requests opened after the deadline. During this time, our focus is to review, merge, and forward-port eligible pull requests that were submitted before the freeze began.

  • Unfreezing Stable Branches: After this initial two-week period, branches for older, stable Gazebo releases will be “unfrozen.” New-feature pull requests targeting these branches can once again be opened and merged.

  • Protecting the main Branch: To ensure the stability of the upcoming release, features merged into stable branches during the freeze will not be forward-ported to main until after the release is complete.

Exception: Branches shared between the upcoming release and older releases (which can happen to slowly changing packages such as gz-cmake) will remain fully frozen for the entire duration of the freeze.

Code Freeze#

After the code freeze date, only critical bug fixes and documentation updates may be merged.

Tutorial Party#

To make sure we have the best release possible the team goes over all the tutorials using pre-releases to check that everything is working as it should and make final tweaks. We invite the community to join the party! If you are new to Gazebo, this would be a great opportunity to get your feet wet. The tutorial party is also a great way for prospective interns and GSoC students to get familiar with Gazebo, meet the community, and close their first Github issue. The tutorials are hosted on gazebosim/gazebo_test_cases and instructions will be posted on Discourse a few weeks before the party starts.

Internal QA/Demo Preparation#

Every year, the Gazebo team prepares a demo to showcase all the new features in the upcoming release. During this period, the team works on finalizing the demo as well as making final package releases.

Community Meeting#

The demo mentioned above is presented to the community.

Official Announcement#

The official release announcement is made on Discourse.

Planned releases#

Please see the Releases for the timeline of and information about future distributions.

Contributing to Gazebo#

Looking for something to work on, or just want to help out? Here are a few resources to get you going.

  1. How to contribute guide.

  2. Feature comparision list. This page lists the feature gaps between Gazebo classic and Gazebo Sim.

  3. Take a look at the various libraries, and the issue tracker associated with each.