Gazebo community tackles latency simulation with ROS delay plugins
Devs rely on topic_tools/delay to simulate network lag, but it's error-prone.
A Gazebo user posted a question on the forum asking how to simulate latency and jitter in sensor data and control commands, a requirement for CI pipelines, PID tuning, and general robotics testing. The obvious approach, using ROS's topic_tools/delay behind the bridge, works but dramatically increases the number of topics, making it error-prone to select the right one. The user wondered if a similar mechanism could exist on the gz-transport side to reduce the ROS topic count, or if something closer to the simulation core itself could inject delay.
Commenters suggested that for reinforcement learning training, latency can be baked directly into model inputs and outputs, avoiding ROS entirely. For other use cases, the discussion surfaced an existing plugin, robot_hw_sim_latency, designed specifically to simulate control packet latency in Gazebo. This plugin works at the hardware interface level, bypassing topic-level hacks and providing a cleaner solution. The thread underscores a broader gap in robotics simulation: network realism is often an afterthought, yet critical for testing controllers and multi-robot systems. As simulations become more integral to CI/CD, expect more tooling to emerge for realistic latency and jitter injection.
- Topic-level delay via topic_tools/delay creates excessive topic counts, making selection error-prone
- A dedicated plugin, robot_hw_sim_latency, simulates control packet latency at the Gazebo hardware interface level
- For RL training, latency can be baked into model inputs/outputs, bypassing ROS simulation entirely
Why It Matters
Realistic latency simulation is critical for robust robotics CI/CD and controller tuning, yet current tooling remains fragmented and manual.