Gazebo Server on Docker Container in EC2 instance & Gazebo Client on MacOS

[Scott-Hickmann]

Hello,

I have Gazebo Harmonic installed on both my Mac and my AWS EC2 instance Docker container. I am trying to run Gazebo on that EC2 instance, but unfortunately it is headless. I first tried setting up X11 forwarding, but this fails because of a wrong OpenGL version on my Mac.

I then tried instead to make the EC2 instance run only the server of Gazebo, and on my Mac run the client only. However, these two programs are running on different networks. I hence tried using VSCode TCP forwarding to forward all ports from the server to my Mac's localhost, but still encountered an issue with discovery.

I ran the following on my Mac Terminal:

GZ_IP=127.0.0.1 GZ_PARTITION=127.0.0.1:ros GZ_VERBOSE=1 gz sim -v 4 -g

and the following on a VSCode Terminal (so that TCP port forwarding happens automatically) on my EC2 instance within the Docker container:

GZ_IP=127.0.0.1 GZ_PARTITION=127.0.0.1:ros GZ_VERBOSE=1 gz sim shapes.sdf -s -v

The problem is that the UDP discovery process doesn't happen properly, since VSCode only forwards TCP, and hence the client keeps printing:

[GUI] [Dbg] [Gui.cc:343] GUI requesting list of world names. The server may be busy downloading resources. Please be patient

I could not find any straightforward way to get around the UDP discovery. UDP forwarding does not seem to be trivial? Do you know how to fix this? What is the recommended way to have a Gazebo server and client running on two different networks?

Thank you for your help,
Scott