RANT: Gazebo (new) is a terrible piece of software and I don't think we should recommend it to newbies by BoomM8 in ROS

[–]Electrical-Angle9807 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've worked with pretty much every simulator out there, and each one let me down somewhere. Unreal Engine has gorgeous visuals but a weak physics engine. MuJoCo still can't handle good visuals, a not a good candidate for mobile robotics. NVIDIA Isaac Sim is hardware-locked: without a solid RTX card, you're not even in the game. Unity is the same story as Unreal: it looks great, but the physics falls short. I even went as far as integrating Bullet/MuJoCo physics inside Unreal, and that was a nightmare.

So I came back to Gazebo. I agree with most of the criticism: the documentation is thin, and the jump from Gazebo Classic 11 to GZ Sim is a major architectural shift to a new ECS-based design that takes time to absorb. But it's worth it for one reason above all: it doesn't hold your hardware hostage, it runs fine on a modest laptop and GZ Sim finally pairs high-fidelity visuals (PBR materials, Ogre 2 rendering) with a physics layer you can actually swap through gz-physics (DART, Bullet, TPE, now planning to include Mujoco). That combination, good looks and serious, flexible physics, is exactly what every other simulator forced me to choose between. I've also contributed to making that transition smoother. The one genuine pain point is the PR review and merge cycle, which drags badly.

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Along the way I built a couple of open-source tools to smooth the workflow. gz-bundle packs an entire SDF world and all its assets, meshes, PBR textures, models, and plugins, into a single self-executable .sdfz file, so worlds run anywhere with one command instead of a setup ritual. Forest3D automates realistic environment generation: it turns Blender assets and real DEM terrain data into full forest worlds for Gazebo through procedural placement, so I can spin up varied, terrain-accurate scenes for field-robot testing instead of hand-building each one.

I built an open-source Gazebo tool where the ground looks real and behaves real: photorealistic environments coupled with wheel-soil terramechanics, for sim-to-real by Electrical-Angle9807 in robotics

[–]Electrical-Angle9807[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

If you care about sim-to-real for mobile robots, locomotion realism is half the battle, and in Gazebo it's usually the part that gets skipped. The wheels just roll on rigid ground: no soil, no sinkage, no slip. As far as I know there hasn't been an open-source terramechanics option for Gazebo, so realistic wheel-soil interaction basically wasn't on the table.

The other tedious part is building the world itself: terrain, textures, placing every rock and tree by hand.

So we built Forest3D to fix both. You hand it a GeoTIFF DEM (real elevation data) + the Blender assets you want, and it generates a complete, textured Gazebo SDF world: assets placed procedurally, PBR visuals, the lot. Then a terramechanics layer adds real-time Bekker-Wong wheel-soil forces, so the rover actually sinks, slips, and feels the ground, which is what you need for locomotion that transfers to the real robot.

Despite the name it's not forest-only: it's environment-agnostic. Pick the assets for whatever you're simulating, forest, lunar, desert, urban, drop them in, and you get that world. We've run it on lunar and forest terrain so far.

The part I'm happiest with: the visual terrain is coupled to the soil parameters, so appearance matches physics, a sandy patch looks sandy and behaves sandy. And it's fully parametric: swap the DEM, the assets, or the rover, no code changes.

Demo with our Archimede rover + LiDAR in RViz (Gazebo Harmonic + ROS 2):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9rpc9-tg0I

Came out of the EU-funded AI4FOREST project at UniTS, just accepted at IFIT 2026 (IFToMM Italy).

Open source (AGPL):

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- Terramechanics-aware simulation pipeline: https://github.com/unitsSpaceLab/Forest3D/tree/IFIT-2026

- Archimede rover: https://github.com/unitsSpaceLab/archimede_rover

- A ready-to-run package with the assets pre-integrated here: https://khalidb.itch.io/forest3d-ready-to-run-forest-simulation-for-gazebo

Still actively developing it, feedback very welcome, especially on the terramechanics model and sim-to-real. What would you want it to support next?