Ignition Gazebo Simulation

WARNING

Ignition Gazebo supports a single frame (quadcopter) and world (July 2021).

Ignition Gazebo (opens new window) is an open source robotics simulator from the Ignition Robotics Project. It is derived from the popular robotics simulator Gazebo, featuring more advanced rendering, physics and sensor models.

Supported Vehicles: Quadrotor

Note

See Simulation for general information about simulators, the simulation environment, and simulation configuration (e.g. supported vehicles).

Installation (Ubuntu Linux)

Note

These instructions were tested on Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04

1. Install the usual Development Environment on Ubuntu LTS / Debian Linux.
2. Install Ignition Gazebo following the installation instructions (opens new window) (sudo may be required):

   sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-stable `lsb_release -cs` main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gazebo-stable.list'
   wget http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
   apt update
   apt install ignition-edifice
   

Running the Simulation

Ignition Gazebo SITL simulation can be conveniently run through a make command as shown below:

cd /path/to/PX4-Autopilot
make px4_sitl ignition

This will run both the PX4 SITL instance and the ignition gazebo client

The supported vehicles and make commands are listed below (click on the links to see the vehicle images).

Vehicle	Command
quadrotor(iris)	make px4_sitl ignition

The commands above launch a single vehicle with the full UI. QGroundControl should be able to automatically connect to the simulated vehicle.

In order to run the simulation without running the ignition gazebo gui, one can use the HEADLESS=1 flag. For example, the following

HEADLESS=1 make px4_sitl ignition

In order to increase the verbose output, VERBOSE_SIM=1 can be used.

VERBOSE_SIM=1 make px4_sitl ignition

Further Information

• px4-simulation-ignition (opens new window)