Gazebo Community: Terrain Generation in Gazebo Using Satellite Imagery (Feb, 2026)

Why It Matters

The tool streamlines realistic environment creation, accelerating development cycles for autonomous systems and reinforcing Gazebo’s role as the de‑facto simulator for ROS‑based robotics.

Key Takeaways

• New Gazebo release cadence aligns with ROS and summer schedule
• Zeno now supports configuration files and multiple networking options
• STB replaces insecure FreeImage, improving security across Gazebo versions
• Terrain Generator automates satellite and DEM data stitching for realistic worlds
• UI-driven tool simplifies spawn location and building integration in simulations

Summary

The February 2026 Gazebo Community meeting opened with a shift in schedule to accommodate a guest speaker from Japan and featured a series of announcements about the simulator’s roadmap.

The PMC presented a new release‑cadence proposal that synchronises Gazebo’s versioning and support windows with ROS, introduced Zeno’s configuration‑file support and multiple networking modes, and announced the replacement of the outdated FreeImage library with the secure STB image library. Ongoing work includes shared‑memory transport for Zeno, a CPU‑light sensor plugin, and a Mujoco physics engine integration.

Guest speaker Sai Aravind demonstrated the Gazebo Terrain Generator, a UI‑driven tool that downloads Bing satellite imagery, DEM tiles and building footprints from Mapbox, stitches them, and optionally creates 3‑D meshes via the tri‑mesh library, eliminating the manual cropping, storage and spawn‑location adjustments that previously plagued developers.

By automating terrain creation, the generator lowers the barrier for realistic simulation in aerospace, mapping and vision‑positioning applications, while the broader platform updates improve security, performance and alignment with the ROS ecosystem, positioning Gazebo as a more robust foundation for next‑generation robotics projects.

Original Description

Speakers: Sai Aravind, Lexxpluss

“A simple tool to generate gazebo terrain using satellite images and DEM data."

Resources:

Agenda: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rJpGluIZtnuKxDHqykwFHfHnjMsQnrvhH0IVtDkyn6s/edit?usp=sharing

Community Meetings Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6FI-gIL5jiGlch_uoSVNhCFaZb9eoj1J

Gazebo Community Calendar: https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=Y19xa2dsODhraTluMTVhYmtrYzdjdjRyMTMza0Bncm91cC5jYWxlbmRhci5nb29nbGUuY29t