Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-03-30

The Gazebo Project Management Committee (PMC) has published its March 30, 2026 meeting minutes, revealing substantial performance improvements to the open-source robotics simulation platform. The most significant technical achievement is a major reduction in build times and memory usage for the gz-physics and gz-cmake components. By making Whole Program Optimization optional on MSVC builds, developers achieved a 2.5x speed improvement in compilation times. Additionally, through codebase modernization and the introduction of TypeLists, the team reduced compiler memory usage by 30-70%, addressing long-standing performance bottlenecks in the development workflow.

Beyond performance optimizations, the Gazebo team continues to expand the platform's simulation capabilities. The gz-sim component now supports graded buoyancy for more complex shapes including cylinders, capsules, ellipsoids, and cones, enabling more realistic underwater robotics simulations. Progress was also reported on MuJoCo support, specifically for retrieving bounding box features in gz-physics. The team is preparing for ROSCon Global in Toronto with plans for a hackathon and working to attract more Google Summer of Code applicants through social media outreach. These developments position Gazebo as an increasingly powerful tool for robotics research and development, particularly for teams working with complex physical simulations and underwater robotics applications.