The Gazebo team is happy to announce the 8th major release of Gazebo, code named Harmonic! 
Harmonic is a long-term support release supported until September 2028.
If you would like to see Gazebo Harmonic in action, we demonstrated many new features at our monthly community meeting:
You can find the full list of new features in the gz-harmonic repo, but here’s a brief summary:
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Harmonic demo world: Try out the Harmonic demo world, which showcases some of the highlights from the Harmonic release!
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Gazebo systems written in Python: Gazebo now provides a way to write systems in Python. In addition, it is now possible to use
gz-transportto publish, subscribe or do service requests from Python -
Automatically compute the Moment of Inertia of Meshes: This feature enables automatic calculation for the Moments of Inertia, Mass, and Inertial Pose (Center of Mass pose) of a link described using SDFormat.
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MouseDrag plugin: This new plugin allows the user to exert forces and torques by dragging objects in the scene with the mouse cursor.
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Support fluid added mass: Adds support for simulating the virtual mass of the displaced volume of objects that are moving through fluids.
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Add bullet-featherstone plugin: Adds support for Bullet’s Featherstone implementation, which is a technique using a reduced coordinate representation of open kinematic chains.
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Generate messages in downstream builds: Re-works message generation so that developers can now easily generate their own message definitions that are compatible with Gazebo tooling, such as msgs or transport.
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Mimic constraint feature using bullet-featherstone: Adds a new joint actuation constraint called the Mimic constraint that enforces a linear relationship between the output position of two joint axes.
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Camera LensFlare: Adds Lens Flare System that adds Lens Flare Render Pass to the camera and allows users to enable lens flare in camera images.
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Global illumination VCT & CI VCT: Adds Real Time Global Illumination on the GUI side based on one of these two techniques: (1) VCT (Voxel Cone Tracing), (2) CI VCT (Cascaded Image Voxel Cone Tracing). Requires Vulkan.
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Show subscribers info when running topic info and list subscribed topics when running topic list: Adds the ability to list subscribers and show their info using
gz topic -landgz topic -i -t <topic_name>. -
Add Projector: Adds a projector feature that projects out a texture onto a surface.
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Wide-angle cameras in ogre2: Ports the wide angle camera implementation to the Ogre2 render engine.
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DopplerVelocityLog sensor: Adds
DopplerVelocityLog(DVL) sensor that produces velocity estimates of underwater vehicles. -
Add rrbot example setup & update readme: An example to demonstrate ROS 2 tools like
robot_state_publisher,joint_state_publisherworking seamlessly with Gazebo while only using SDFormat files (i.e., without using any URDF files).
As of the release date, the currently supported platforms are:
- Ubuntu Jammy (22.04)
- MacOS Monterey and Ventura
- Windows 10 (partial support)
We’d like to thank all contributors to this release:
Full list of contributors
- Aaron Chong
- Addisu Z. Taddese
- Aditya Pande
- Alejandro Hernández Cordero
- Alex
- Anas Aamoum
- Andrej Orsula
- Angelo Elias Dal Zotto
- Anton Bredenbeck
- Arjo Chakravarty
- AzulRadio
- Ben Wolsieffer
- Benjamin Perseghetti
- Bi0T1N
- Brian
- Carlos Agüero
- Cristóbal Arroyo
- Crola1702
- danilogsch
- Dharini Dutia
- El Jawad Alaa
- Grey
- Henrique Barros Oliveira
- Ian Chen
- Ivan Santiago Paunovic
- Jasmeet Singh
- Jenn Nguyen
- Joan Aguilar Mayans
- Jochen Sprickerhof
- Jorge Perez
- Jose Luis Rivero
- jrutgeer
- Julian Oes
- Kenji Brameld
- Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis
- Kvk Praneeth
- Levi Armstrong
- Liam Han
- Louise Poubel
- Luca Della Vedova
- Mabel Zhang
- Marco A. Gutiérrez
- Marko Križmančić
- Marq Rasmussen
- Martin Pecka
- Matias N. Goldberg
- Matthew LeMay
- methylDragon
- Michael Carroll
- Michel Hidalgo
- mosfet80
- Nate Koenig
- Onur Berk Töre
- quentingllmt
- Rhys Mainwaring
- RobbertProost
- Robert Plante
- Sanjuksha
- shameekganguly
- Silvio Traversaro
- Steve Peters
- talregev
- Tejal Ashwini Barnwal
- Valentina Vasco
- Vít Ondruch
- Will Stott
- William Lew
- Zaidhaan
We’d also like to give especial thanks to the community members who helped us review Harmonic tutorials during the Tutorial Party:
- Allison Thackston
- Andrej Orsula
- Bi0T1N
- JACOB JAMES K
- Jayesh Chaudhary
- jmackay2
- Kartik Rana
- Martin Pecka
- Rhys Mainwaring
- Suresh Venkatesan
- Veronika Bojtar
- Yuri Oliveira
If you would like to show your support for the project be sure to get your Harmonic swag! All proceeds go to support the project.
The next release, Gazebo Ionic, is scheduled to be released in September 2024. Keep an eye on the roadmap for what’s coming up, and let us know what features you’re interested in!
The Gazebo Dev Team