Ignition Fortress Released

The simulation team at Open Robotics is happy to announce the 2nd LTS release of Ignition, code named Fortress! This is the sixth major release of Ignition, following Edifice, Dome, Citadel, Blueprint and Acropolis.

Get started with these instructions.

Fortress is a long-term support release supported until September 2026.

If you would like to see Ignition Fortress in action, we demonstrated most of the new features at our monthly community meeting, which you can watch on Vimeo.

Briefly, here are some of the features that you’ll find in Fortress:

• Fortress world : Try out the Fortress demo world, which showcases lots of new features at once!

• Segmentation camera: new sensor that generates semantic and panoptic segmentation images.

• Joint force-torque sensor: new sensor that reports forces and torques on a joint.

• Custom sensors: it’s now easier to create your own sensors and load them into simulation.

• Visualizations: view models as wireframe or transparent, and also view more properties like center of mass, inertia and joints.

• Orthographic view: Toggle the 3D scene into orthographic projection.

• SDF <pose> now accepts degrees and quaternions

• Heightmaps with Ogre 2: Heightmaps are now also available with the latest version of the rendering engine.

• Headless rendering using EGL: it’s now possible to run Ogre 2 rendering without a window.

• Spherical coordinates: Support for spawning and teleporting entities based on their latitude and longitude.

• Buoyancy engine: simulates a mechanical bladder, such as a ballast tank, to control buoyancy of underwater vehicles.

• ROS integration : Fortress can be used with Melodic, Noetic and Rolling, and it will be the official Ignition version for the upcoming Humble release.

On top of that, with Fortress you also get all the features that have been added to earlier releases since Edifice’s release 6 months ago (we backport new features whenever possible). Some highlights:

• ign model CLI (from Citadel): command line tool to inspect running simulations.

• Test fixture (from Citadel): helper class with examples of how to setup simulation-based automated tests.

• 2D teleop widget (from Citadel): easily control mobile robots from the GUI.

• 3D plot (from Citadel): plot the path of entities as they move on the 3D scene.

• Web visualization (from Dome): view running simulations on a web browser.

• Bullet physics engine (from Dome): support for most physics features using the Bullet physics engine.

• Parametrized SDF files (from Dome): Add, remove, modify or replace elements within <include> tags.

• Contact visualization (from Dome): view contacts between entities on the 3D scene.

• Hydrodynamics with ocean currents (from Edifice): simulate underwater dynamics such as drag, as well as uniform currents.

If you enjoy this release and would like to help support the Ignition community, please consider picking up some Ignition Fortress branded swag.

As of the release date, the currently supported platforms are:

• Ubuntu Bionic (18.04) and Focal (20.04)

• MacOS Catalina and BigSur (headless mode only)

• Ignition Fortress branded swagWindows 10 (partial support)

We'd like to thank all contributors to this release:

Aaron Chong
Addisu Z. Taddese
Aditya Pande
Adwait Naik
Alejandro Hernández Cordero
Ammaar Solkar
Amr Elsersy
Andrej Orsula
Arjo Chakravarty
Ashton Larkin
Atharva Pusalkar
Caio Amaral
Carl Saldanha
Carlos Agüero
Claire Wang
Cole Biesemeyer
David Kanekanian
David V. Lu!!
Devansh Chawla
Diego Ferigo
Dre Westcook
Edwin Fan
Eric Cousineau
Franco Cipollone
Gonzalo de Pedro
Guillaume Doisy
Hill Ma
Ian Chen
Jacob Perron
Jaldert Rombouts
Jenn Nguyen
Jorge Perez
Jose Luis Rivero
Jose Tomas Lorente
Juan Oxoby
Katherine Scott
Kunal Tyagi
Lola Segura
Louise Poubel
Luca Della Vedova
Mabel Zhang
Marco A. Gutiérrez
Marcos Wagner
Martin Pecka
Martiño Crespo
Matias N. Goldberg
Max Zwingel
Michael Carroll
Michael Grey
Nate Koenig
Paramjit Singh Baweja
Rafi Abdullah
Rhys Mainwaring
Rushyendra Maganty
Scott Logan
Sebastian Wallkötter
Silvio Traversaro
Steve Peters
Steven! Ragnarök
Tim Player
Varun Agrawal
Vatan Aksoy Tezer
William Lew
Zhenpeng Ge
Yasutomo Kawanishi

We’d like to give especial thanks to the community members who helped us review Fortress tutorials during the Tutorial Party:

Yuri Oliveira
Kvk Praneeth
Harsha Vardhan
wongrufus
Isaac I.Y. Saito
Shyam

The next release, Ignition Garden, is scheduled to be released on September 2022 (yes, you read that right, the release cadence is changing to 1 year). Keep an eye on the roadmap for what’s coming up, and let us know what features you’re interested in!

Be sure to get your Fortress shirt!

The Ignition Dev Team