Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-03-02
The robotics simulator's PMC meeting reveals GSoC 2026 acceptance, a major release schedule overhaul, and new Docker container images.
The Gazebo Project Management Committee (PMC) detailed its 2026 roadmap in its March 2 meeting, focusing on community growth and technical infrastructure. A major highlight is Gazebo's acceptance into Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2026, with student project proposals due by March 16 and final applications by March 31. The committee also held substantive discussions on a proposal to shift Gazebo's official release cadence to March, aiming to better synchronize with the release cycles of the Robot Operating System (ROS) and ROSCon event preparations. This move includes potentially synchronizing version letters and skipping the 'Kura' release name.
The meeting covered significant technical updates, including the official support for Gazebo open container images on Docker, with work ongoing for server-only variants. The team is addressing a broken macOS Homebrew CI pipeline for gz-sim (issue #3365) caused by upstream protobuf updates. Other progress includes the upload of DART physics engine version 6.16 to unstable repositories, merged pull requests for Zenoh session configuration in gz-transport, and testing of virtual packages (gz-virtual-pkg-test) to solve dependency conflict management. The PMC also reflected on lessons from the previous 'Ignition to Gazebo' rebranding to avoid future confusion during the ongoing 'Gazebo-classic' transition.
- Gazebo accepted into GSoC 2026 with student proposal deadline of March 16, 2026.
- Proposal to shift release cadence to March for better alignment with ROS and ROSCon.
- New officially supported Docker container images released, with server-only variants in development.
Why It Matters
These developments are crucial for robotics developers relying on Gazebo for simulation, affecting release planning, CI/CD pipelines, and containerized deployment.