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gazebosim/gz-sim
Open source robotics simulator. The latest version of Gazebo.
Gazebo Sim is the successor to Gazebo Classic — a full-featured robotics simulator with physics, sensors, and 3D rendering, built on a modular library stack (gz-physics, gz-rendering, gz-sensors). It's the de facto simulator for ROS 2 development and DARPA robotics competitions. If you're doing serious robot simulation work in 2026, this is what you use.
16+ years of accumulated simulation infrastructure: realistic physics via pluggable backends (DART, Bullet, TPE), sensor models that actually match hardware behavior (IMU noise, lidar return patterns), and an ECS architecture (EntityComponentManager) that makes writing plugins straightforward once you understand it. The SDF world format is expressive and the Fuel model repository means you're not modeling everything from scratch. Distributed simulation support for splitting large worlds across machines is a genuine differentiator over most alternatives. Python bindings plus the TCP transport layer mean you can drive the sim from RL training loops without fighting a GUI.
The install story on anything other than Ubuntu Noble is painful — Windows requires splitting server and GUI into two separate processes and the README casually mentions this as a known issue rather than a blocker. The plugin API has significant churn between major versions (the gz-sim 7→8→9 migrations break almost every plugin), and the Migration.md files cover the obvious API renames but miss the subtle behavioral changes. Documentation frequently links to tutorials that were written for Ignition Gazebo (the previous branding) and assumes you know which version maps to which ROS 2 release. Star count (1.3k) dramatically understates the actual user base because most people install via apt and never visit the repo.