ArduPilot Gazebo plugin

A Gazebo simulator plugin that connects ArduPilot SITL to Gazebo, with example vehicle models and worlds for quadcopters, delta wings and gimbals.

Made by ArduPilot.

Licenses

Code: LGPL-3.0-only (opens in a new tab)
Read by Robotheca from LICENSE.md (opens in a new tab) (LGPL-3.0-only) at commit 082a0fe (opens in a new tab), on 16 Oct 2026.
Commercial use: Yes

Copyleft: Modified source must be published.

Connects ArduPilot SITL to Gazebo through JSON data exchange, with lockstepped simulation time.
Supports recent Gazebo releases (Garden, Harmonic, Ionic and Jetty) and uses the ogre2 rendering engine.
Includes an Iris quadcopter example, a Zephyr delta wing example and a 3-axis gimbal with a zoomable camera.
Can stream camera images over UDP using GStreamer, viewable with GStreamer tools or QGroundControl.
Offers a speed-up option that runs the simulation faster than real time.
Additional vehicle models are available separately in the ArduPilot SITL_Models repository.

Written by Robotheca from the project's README (opens in a new tab) at commit 082a0fe.

Difficulty: Intermediate
Hardware it needs, as the project states it: Ubuntu 22.04 is supported, with Ubuntu 20.04 or later needed for the OpenGL support of ogre2 when run in a virtual machine; macOS (Big Sur, Monterey and Ventura, Intel and M1) is also mentioned.
How to start: The project's README (opens in a new tab)

Checked on GitHub on 16 Oct 2026.

No robot on Robotheca is linked to it yet. Links come from a robot's robot.yaml, from its dependency files read as text, or from Robotheca's editors.

Robotheca lists software as a reference: nothing is hosted or run here, and every fact links to where it was read.