gazzeebo software

Gazebo makes heavy use of asynchronous message passing. For example, the Gazebo GUI operates in a separate process from the server and relies on message passing to display information and transmit user requests. Gazebo's current internal communication uses a home-grown strategy based on Protobuf and boost::asio. This has performed well but requires... maintenance and has become a bit outdated. Development of Ignition Transport provided the opportunity to choose a new strategy that would reduce our maintenance effort and offer new features. ZeroMQ has been chosen as a replacement to boost::asio, and Protobuf remains as the message definition. ZeroMQ is an open source communication library that is used across numerous domains, and has a large and active community. In addition to these aspects, ZeroMQ has a well established feature and change process, known performance, numerous language bindings, cross-platform support , and security through authentication and encryption. In addition to the features provided by ZeroMQ, Ignition Transport provides discovery, and command line tools for topic introspection and publication of messages. Upcoming features include data logging, and integration of encryption and UDP provided in ZeroMQ. A series of benchmark tests of Ignition Transport were recently performed to evaluate the library's performance and establish a baseline. We will start with a few definitions for clarity.Read More