Gazebo PMC Meeting Minutes 2026-04-06

The Gazebo Project Management Committee (PMC) has outlined significant developments in their latest meeting, headlined by the imminent announcement of the 'Gazebo Rotary' release. This new development branch will be paired with ROS Rolling, and the team is emphasizing its experimental nature, warning users that breakage is expected. Alongside this release, a major technical breakthrough was discussed: an experimental implementation of the Entity Component Manager (ECM) using the EnTT library, which has shown promising benchmark results with a potential 4x performance improvement in specific simulation scenarios. The team is actively seeking community feedback on this performance-focused architecture change.

Beyond the core simulator, the PMC is tackling infrastructure and community scaling challenges. They are investigating Windows build failures related to the `pixi` tool and have upgraded their Windows build agents to 16GB of RAM. To manage the growing influx of contributions, they proposed introducing a 'good first review' label to encourage community members to assist with initial PR reviews. Other notable updates include hydrodynamic model reviews in `gz-sim`, the deployment of Gazebo Rotary packages to the nightly Linux repository, and preliminary discussions on using Open Badges to digitally recognize contributor achievements. The team is also preparing for ROSCon 2026, with a brainstorming session planned for proposal ideas.