About Gazebo
Gazebo is a multi-robot simulator for outdoor environments. Like Stage, it is capable of simulating a population of robots, sensors and objects, but does so in a three-dimensional world. It generates both realistic sensor feedback and physically plausible interactions between objects (it includes an accurate simulation of rigid-body physics).
Developers
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Nate Koenig Co-founder of Gazebo at the University of Southern California with Dr. Andrew Howard. Nate's work on Gazebo continues at OSRF. |
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John Hsu Chief Science Officer at OSRF, and Physics Lead of Gazebo. |
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Mihai Dolha Long time user and developer of Gazebo and some of its key components. |
Retired Developers
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Andrew Howard Co-founder of Gazebo at the University of Southern California. |
History
Gazebo started in the fall of 2002 at the University of Southern California. The original creators were Dr. Andrew Howard and his student Nate Koenig. The concept of a high-fidelity simulator stemmed from the need to simulate robots in outdoor environments under various conditions. As a complimentary simulator to Stage, the name Gazebo was chosen as the closest structure to an outdoor stage. The name has stuck despite the fact that most users of Gazebo simulate indoor environments.
Since its inception, Andrew and Nate continued work on Gazebo until Andrew left USC to join JPL. At this point Nate assumed sole responsibility of the project. Work continued throughout Nate's PhD career and various internships to produce to a more robust and general purpose tool for the robotics community.
In 2009, John Hsu, a Senior Research Engineer at Willow, integrated ROS and the PR2 into Gazebo, which has since become one the primary tools used in the ROS community. A few years later in the Spring of 2011, Willow Garage started providing financial support for the development of Gazebo. In the coming months and years, Gazebo will rapidly mature in a user-friendly, stable, and cross-platform research and design tool for robots and robotic applications.