Running Gazebo on a Server in ROS

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Since gzserver is just a normal ROS node, it can run on one machine (e.g. a headless server), and you can have other nodes running on a different machine (e.g. your desktop PC). This tutorial explains how to do it.

There are some caveats, though:

• You must have full network connectivity between both machines; no firewalls, blocked ports or NAT between them. You can get around that by setting up a VPN, but that's not trivial.
• You should pay attention to the bandwidth of the topics exchanged between nodes running on the two different machines. If you're simulating a Kinect or a stereo camera in Gazebo on your server and subscribe to it (for example, using RViz) on your desktop machine, you're probably going to create more traffic than most "home ISP" connections can handle. You can get around this by grouping nodes which exchange a lot of data together on the same machine.

Oh, and of course the Gazebo GUI is a separate node from the Gazebo server, so all of the above applies.