Gazebo PMC: MuJoCo integration yields 40% speedup, Vulkan and Ogre 3.0 on radar
MuJoCo physics system benchmarks show 40% speedup; AI-powered PR visualizations debated.
The Gazebo PMC meeting on June 22, 2026, covered several key technical developments. A MuJoCo physics system integration directly on the ECS (gz-sim#3690) demonstrated up to 40% speedup in benchmarks. The team deferred full migration to MuJoCo as a system until a sufficient abstraction layer is developed, leaving the gz-physics API in place for now. Meanwhile, performance improvements for STL and COLLADA loaders have been merged, with three COLLADA PRs ready for review. Protobuf Arena allocation was merged and backported to boost publisher performance.
Other discussion points included experiments with AI-generated interactive HTML pages to supplement pull requests (e.g., gz-rendering#1303), with the consensus that critical review details must remain in GitHub to avoid overwhelming reviewers. Vulkan support remains incomplete in Ogre 2.3 due to a build-time regression, prompting consideration of an Ogre 3.0 upgrade. Process fan-out using shared memory and flat buffers is being explored to bypass single-threaded rendering bottlenecks. Infrastructure updates include CI upgrades to Ubuntu 26.04 (Rotary) and 24.04 (Harmonic), pending Terraform branch protection updates. Funding proposals for OSRA 2026 are due June 30, covering CI experiments with pixi, documentation revamps, and canonical demos. Security upgrades for Jenkins and extended support windows matching ROS timelines are also in progress.
- MuJoCo integration on ECS achieves up to 40% speedup; full migration deferred pending abstraction layer.
- Vulkan support blocked by Ogre 2.3 build regression; Ogre 3.0 upgrade under consideration.
- CI upgrades to Ubuntu 26.04 for Rotary and 24.04 for Harmonic pending Terraform updates.
Why It Matters
These updates accelerate simulation performance and modernize Gazebo's rendering pipeline, critical for robotics and autonomous systems.