Gazebo Bridge (Host)

Runs on your local machine and bridges a native Gazebo Sim process to ROS2/Gazebo Transport running inside a remote Dev Container, SSH remote, WSL, or GitHub Codespace — so you get native GPU/graphics performance for the simulator without giving up a container-based ROS2 environment.

Status: early / pre-alpha. The core relay mechanism is proven on a real cross-machine deployment, but this hasn't seen broad testing yet — expect rough edges.

Requires the companion extension

This is one half of a pair — install Gazebo Bridge (Remote) (RoboStar.gz-bridge-remote) too, inside your Dev Container / Codespace; it needs to be running there for the bridge to do anything. These aren't wired as a hard Marketplace dependency: this extension runs on your local machine (extensionKind: ["ui"]), so it activates in every window you open, remote or not — a hard dependency on gz-bridge-remote (which can only ever exist inside a remote connection) would nag you to install it even in windows with nothing to do with this project. Add RoboStar.gz-bridge-remote to the target project's devcontainer.json customizations.vscode.extensions instead, so it's only ever suggested where it's actually relevant.

What it does

• Relays Gazebo Transport's UDP-multicast discovery traffic and the dynamically-negotiated TCP data connections it sets up, across the container boundary.
• Intercepts gz sim ... launches issued inside the container and runs the real simulator natively on your machine, streaming its output back to the container's terminal.
• Syncs the SDF worlds/models/meshes a launch references from the container's filesystem into a local cache, so the native process can actually find them.
• Builds native Gazebo system plugins from source synced out of the container, or fetches prebuilt release binaries declared via a package's package.xml.

Commands

• Gazebo Bridge: Show Host Relay Status
• Gazebo Bridge: Sync Resources from Remote
• Gazebo Bridge: Build Native Plugins

Settings

• gzBridge.nativeGzCommand — local gz command to run (default gz, resolved via your normal PATH).
• gzBridge.nativeConfigPath — value for GZ_CONFIG_PATH. VS Code doesn't source your shell profile, so anything set there (e.g. Homebrew's gz-harmonic caveats) isn't inherited automatically.
• gzBridge.nativeGuiPluginPath — value for GZ_GUI_PLUGIN_PATH, e.g. to point at a locally-built GUI plugin instead of the one bundled with your Gazebo install.
• gzBridge.nativePluginSources — workspace-relative paths to CMake-buildable native plugin sources to sync and build before each launch.

A note on trust

This extension spawns local processes and runs CMake builds using paths and arguments supplied by whatever remote/container it's connected to. That's the intended behavior when you control the container — be aware of it before connecting to one you don't.

Third-party notices

Bundles vendored gz-msgs protobuf schemas (discovery.proto, header.proto, time.proto), Apache License 2.0, Copyright Open Source Robotics Foundation.

License

Apache-2.0