Gazebo PMC votes on C++20, Ubuntu 26.04, and future planning

The Gazebo Project Management Committee (PMC) met on May 11, 2026, to discuss several key initiatives. An asynchronous vote is being conducted to establish a Gazebo Future Planning Working Group, with ballots due by May 18. The team is actively debating bumping the required C++ standard to C++20, and community input is encouraged via the dedicated Zulip stream. Ubuntu 26.04 support is making headway: rotary Debian binaries are now available in the nightly repository, and stable branch continuous integration is under review. Additionally, the committee is brainstorming proposals for OSRA 2026 funding and working to restore build farm statistics after scaling back nodes on weekends.

On the technical front, several migrations and optimizations are underway. The Ogre 1.12 migration is under review, while the migration from FreeImage to Ogre 2.3 is waiting on Debian packages. Performance improvements in gz-math include a new microbenchmark and correctness fixes. Work on ros_buildfarm addresses a missing bzip2 dependency. Gazebo on Resolute now supports Ogre 2.3.3 and Dart 6.16, and ball joint support in Mujoco has been merged. Finally, a new navigation menu section for documentation has been added at gazebosim.org/docs/latest.