(!) Please ask about problems and questions regarding this tutorial on answers.gazebosim.org. Don't forget to include in your question the link to this page, the versions of your OS & ROS, and also add appropriate tags.

Running Simulator Headless

Description: Running simulation without a graphics card or GLX support.

Tutorial Level: INTERMEDIATE

Users are highly discouraged from using the documentation and tutorials for Gazebo on this page. Gazebo is now a stand alone project at gazebosim.org. See documentation there, thanks!

/!\ Disclaimer On fuerte and groovy issues are reported.

Running Gazebo Simulator Headless

When the graphics card or driver does not fully support OpenGL rendering (see simulator_gazebo/SystemRequirements, specify '-r' option when starting up gazebo to disable any function calls to simulator rendering (Ogre) components. For example,

rosmake gazebo_worlds
roslaunch gazebo_worlds empty_world_no_x.launch

This is essentially the same as doing below under C-Turtle:

rosmake gazebo_worlds
rosrun gazebo gazebo -r `rospack find gazebo_worlds`/worlds/empty.world

or equivalent for Box-Turtle:

rosmake gazebo_worlds
source `rospack find gazebo`/setup.bash
rosrun gazebo gazebo -r `rospack find gazebo_worlds`/worlds/empty.world

Nothing will appear on the screen after executing one of the above commands, but simulation should be running. After which, you can proceed as usual to adding objects to the world.

Note that in this mode, the simulation runs without starting up any of the components that requires OpenGL/GLX capabilities. This means that camera image sensors and the GUI window are not created, but everything else should work as before (e.g. dynamics, laser sensors, etc.).

Wiki: simulator_gazebo/Tutorials/RunningSimulatorHeadless (last edited 2017-07-07 18:19:35 by BryceWilley)