ROS Toolbox compatibility with Gazebo

With R2021b, the packaged Ubuntu 18.04 VM from MathWorks provides a ROS2 Dashing / Gazebo 9, but what we have installed is Ubuntu 20.04, ROS2 Foxy / Gazebo 11. Is the R2021b ROS Toolbox compatible with this newer combination or will we run into issues ? Thank You

Answer 1

[Cam Salzberger]

Hello Alexander,

There have been issues communicating between ROS 2 Dashing and Foxy for some users. Here is a page addressing that, and another with additional workarounds. I'm not personally knowledable about Gazebo 9 to Gazebo 11 compatibility.

However, the pre-release of R2022a is available, if you have a license that supports the use of pre-releases. R2022a ROS Toolbox makes use of ROS 2 Foxy for communication and Robotics System Toolbox's Gazebo Co-Simulation is compatible with Gazebo 11. So that may be an option to explore.

-Cam

[Alexander]

Thanks Cam. Do you know if R2022a resolves the ROS2 Dashing and Foxy communication issues?

[Cam Salzberger]

If you are trying to communicate between MATLAB and an installed Foxy environment, then yes. R2022a ROS Toolbox now ships with Foxy, so it will no longer have any version incompatibility.

If you now have the opposite situation from normal, trying to communicate between MATLAB and an installed Dashing environment, then there may be issues in that direction. Modifying which DDS middleware is used for communication (similar to the workaround used to communicate R2021b <-> Foxy) may help to resolve potential issues that have Fast-DDS (Fast-RTPS) as the cause.

-Cam