Gazebo not found, skipping rosflight_sim

#1

When installing rosflight following the ros2 set up guide, after the step of colcon build I receive the following error which doesn’t allow me to install the rosflight_sim package.

Starting >>> rosplane_sim       
--- stderr: rosflight_sim                                                                      
Gazebo not found, skipping rosflight_sim
---

I know it is stated in the setup guide that gazebo does not have an arm64 build target. Still, is it impossible to perform the complete installation with all the packages, including rosflight_sim?

#2

As of right now, rosflight_sim requires Gazebo Classic to build and run. If you’re using an arm64 computer, then you won’t be able to natively build the sim package.

This is something we are planning on fixing by removing Gazebo as a required dependency (and upgrading to the latest version of Gazebo), but we haven’t gotten to that yet unfortunately. It is possible to use x86-64 Docker containers to run and compile rosflight_sim on arm64 computers, if you want. You would just need to use the osrf/ros:humble-desktop Docker image.

#3

I was looking at the possibility of using the arm64 version of gazebo 11 found in this PPA, as it was mentioned at the end of Issue #3236
Do you think it could work?

#4

As long as it uses the same plugin API then I think it should work. I also haven’t ever tried it, so it’s hard to say for sure.