Gazebo PMC Meeting: Namespaces, MuJoCo Integration, and Build Farm Updates

The Gazebo PMC meeting on June 1, 2026, covered significant infrastructure and feature updates. A key decision was the official approval of the Gazebo Future Planning Working Group to guide long-term roadmapping. The team discussed adding namespaces to models and plugins (design#11, sdformat#1659) to eliminate the need for xacro-based prefixing in multirobot simulations with ROS, greatly simplifying configuration. A new high-level project board was proposed to track major features rather than individual PRs, improving visibility. The maintainer list is being revisited to ensure adequate code review coverage.

On the technical front, build farm greenness remains above 90% despite recent instability from scraper activity and high RAM usage due to the FlakyTest plugin (which may be disabled). Terraform is being adopted to automate branch protections and agent configuration. Patches for the Dirty Pipe kernel vulnerability are progressing. MuJoCo integration added support for joint mimic constraints (gz-physics#990), universal and screw joints (gz-physics#980), and setting external forces and torques (gz-physics#992). The team also explored implementing physics engines as Gazebo systems to reduce data copying overhead. ros_gz saw sensor_msgs bounds fixes and restored rolling CI on Ubuntu 26.04. A Protobuf arena crash during shutdown is under investigation. Ubuntu 26.04 support is almost green for rotary CI, with PR CI jobs switching soon. CMake warnings were enabled on macOS for several packages, with a fix pending for gz-gui.