Document gazebo client connection with gazebo server

[elpiel]

Overview

The gazebo server is running in a docker container in Headless mode, however, if you have installed gazebo client on your host machine you can connect to the server.

Benefits

This will allow people to view and manipulate the gazebo environment, for example to:

• observe the drone while it's flying
• manipulate the simulation environment by adding or moving objects and other features that the client allows for.

What you should do

Document the command we can use to connect to the server.

Tasks

Explain how to connect a gazebo client to the server in:

• README (not really needed)
• book - Add a section in the book

Bugs

• ign-transport not working
• Models don't load - because they need to be loaded from the host machine

[elpiel]

Due to the fact that PX4-Autopilot uses Ubuntu 18.04, this means that it uses gazebo 9.0.0 and while newer versions of Ubuntu (like 20.04) have v9 of gazebo (gazebo9 packages) it's newer than 9.0.0 and does not connect to the server.

I found this repo that has ROS/Gazebo Dockerfiles and uses X server and remote connection to the running container with a mount of the display (I believe) but I was not able to replicate the display part in a new Docker image. Maybe we can try using that image and see if it would work? 🤔

https://github.com/racinmat/gazebo-docker

[o0Ignition0o]

I dunno about gazebo client, but http://qgroundcontrol.com/ works and it s awesome :D

[elpiel]

I dunno about gazebo client, but http://qgroundcontrol.com/ works and it s awesome :D

That's true, however, the gzclient is not an operational software but the GUI for the simulation tool.
It gives you the possibility to add objects, change parameters and so on.

Now we have information about connecting with gzclient inside docker, however, we have some issues regarding the loading of the models and ign-transport.

I'm adding them to this issue as tasks.