Run Gazebo
These three steps will run Gazebo with a default world.
Install Gazebo.
Open a terminal. On most Ubuntu systems you can press
CTRL+ALT+t
-
Start Gazebo by entering the following at the command prompt.
gazebo
Run Gazebo with a robot
Let's simulate something a bit more interesting by loading a world with a pioneer2dx.
-
Open a terminal and enter the following command.
gazebo worlds/pioneer2dx.world
Where are the worlds located?
You may have noticed the mysterious worlds/pioneer2dx.world
argument in the above command. This instructs gazebo to find the pioneer2dx.world
file, and load it on start.
World files are located in a versioned system directory, for example /usr/share/gazebo-7
on Ubuntu. If you have Gazebo 7.0 installed on Ubuntu, in a terminal type the following to see a complete list of worlds.
ls /usr/share/gazebo-/worlds
For a Gazebo 7.0 installation on OS X using Homebrew, type the following to see a complete list of worlds.
ls /usr/local/share/gazebo-/worlds
Client and server separation
The gazebo
command actually runs two different executables for you. The first is called gzserver
, and the second gzclient
.
The gzserver
executable runs the physics update-loop and sensor data generation. This is the core of Gazebo, and can be used independently of a graphical interface. You may see the phrase "run headless" thrown about in the forums. This phrase equates to running only the gzserver
. An example use case would involve running gzserver
on a cloud computer where a user interface is not needed.
The gzclient
executable runs a QT based user interface. This application provides a nice visualization of simulation, and convenient controls over various simulation properties.
Try running each of these executables. Open a terminal and run the server:
gzserver
Open another terminal and run the graphical client:
gzclient
At this point you should see the Gazebo user interface. You restart the gzclient
application as often as you want, and even run multiple interfaces.