Ignition Citadel Released
The simulation team at Open Robotics is happy to announce another major release of Ignition, code named Citadel! This is the third major release of Ignition, following Blueprint and Acropolis.
This will be Ignition’s first LTS, with 5 years of support ending in December 2024. This is also planned to be the first entire Ignition collection to be included into Debian Sid, targeting Ubuntu Focal.
Here are a few highlights since Blueprint’s release 6 months ago:
SDF frame semantics: Support for the new pose frame semantics introduced in the SDFormat 1.7 specification. With this addition, it is now possible to specify the poses of elements in SDF files relative to other frames.
Animated actors: It’s now possible to spawn animated characters into Ignition when using Ogre 1 as the rendering engine. Run an example with ign gazebo actor.sdf.
Visualization markers: Various shapes can be spawned into simulation through a convenient message interface, see an example here.
Thermal camera: Initial support for a thermal camera sensor. Object temperatures can be set through the C++ API and thermal image messages obtained in a 16 bit unsigned int format. Soon to be added to Ignition Gazebo.
Upload models to Fuel: Use the ign fuel upload command to upload models to https://app.ignitionrobotics.org. See instructions here.
Grid: All worlds using Ogre 1 have a grid showing by default, which can be turned off from SDF, see ign gazebo sensors.sdf for example.
Breadcrumbs: A system that adds the ability to deploy new models at specified offsets from the location of the model to which the system is attached. Launch ign gazebo breadcrumbs.sdf and follow these instructions.
Delete models from GUI through their context menu.
Drag models from Ignition Fuel into simulation. For example, drag this link straight into the 3D scene.
Rechargeable batteries: Try ign gazebo linear_battery_demo.sdf and see instructions here.
ROS integration: All ros_ign packages have been updated to work with both Citadel and Blueprint as well as ROS 1 and ROS 2. The debian packages ros-melodic-ros-ign will continue to install the Blueprint version, but both Melodic and Dashing versions can be built from source for Citadel. Try Melodic demos here and Dashing demos here.
Deprecations:
The ign-gazebo executable was deprecated in Blueprint and removed in Citadel. Gazebo can be run using the ign command line tool.
It’s no longer possible to install the ignition-gazeboX package. Instead, install ignition-citadel or libignition-gazebo3-dev
The currently supported platforms are:
Ubuntu Bionic (18.04)
MacOS Mojave (headless mode only)
Windows (partial support for some libraries)
The next release, Ignition Dome, is scheduled to be released on September 2020. Keep an eye on the roadmap for what’s coming up, and let us know what features you’re interested in!
PS: This is the last day to get your Citadel shirt!
The Ignition Dev Team