bcr_arm: An open source simulated arm for ROS2, Gazebo and Isaac Sim

There has been rapid change in Gazebo distros over the last 2 years, it is hard to find a robotic arm that out of the supported multiple Gazebo versions. This results in a heavy time investment to get basic resources up and running. The documentation is often unclear and continuously evolving. The transition from Gazebo Classic to the modern Gazebo framework has resulted in multiple long-term support (LTS) distributions: Fortress, Garden, Harmonic, each with subtle but critical differences in their APIs, plugin architecture, and ROS integration.

Isaac Sim, NVIDIA's simulation platform for AI-powered robotics, recently became open source as part of the Omniverse ecosystem. While this makes high-fidelity simulation more accessible, its rapidly changing APIs and Python-based extensions still present a learning curve for new developers.

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The rapid release cycles of both ROS2 and Gazebo have created compatibility challenges, making it difficult to find a stable robotic arm simulation that works out of the box across various platforms.

We introduce bcr_arm, an open-source platform designed to help solve these technical hurdles.

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What is it?

bcr_arm is an open-source, 7-degree-of-freedom (DOF) robotic arm simulation platform. We specifically chose a 7-DOF configuration because of its kinematic redundancy, which supports more complex manipulation tasks. This extra degree of freedom allows for null-space motion, enabling the arm to reconfigure its joints to optimize for secondary objectives without changing the end-effector pose.

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The release provides a pre-configured environment for today's development stacks:

• ROS 2 Humble with Gazebo Fortress on Ubuntu 22.04
• ROS 2 Jazzy with Gazebo Harmonic on Ubuntu 24.04
• NVIDIA Isaac Sim - to support the development of photorealistic and AI-driven manipulation applications.

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Core Features

• Fully pre-configured simulation environment
• Support for MoveIt 2 motion planning
• Integration with ros2_control and controller interfaces
• Compatible with Isaac Sim Action Graph, allowing you to use Isaac workflows with ROS 2-based arm simulations.

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Future Work

We are committed to maintaining compatibility with future LTS releases of ROS2 and Gazebo. We are also finalizing a vacuum gripper end-effector, which will be released shortly to support a wider range of manipulation and pick and place tasks.

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Conclusion

Our goal with bcr_arm is to provide a goto reference with regards to robotic manipulator simulation with newer LTS versions of Gazebo, and we welcome all contributions to it! We believe that by providing a well-documented, and feature-rich platform, we can help accelerate the development of the next generation of robotic applications.

Check it out at github.com/blackcoffeerobotics/bcr_arm/

If you‘re looking to create advanced and large simulations for your robotic applications with gz-sim, reach out to us!

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