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For the foreseeable future, we'll be developing with and releasing against Fuerte. We know it better, it's been out longer, and as a result is less likely to yield surprises. If I had to guess now, I would say that we'll be using Fuerte for the VRC this summer.

In parallel, we'll start evaluating Groovy. It would help us if folks who are motivated to use Groovy with drcsim could start trying it out themselves. The source installation instructions would be a good starting point. If everything can be built against Groovy, we could start spinning experimental binary .debs that build against Groovy.

Note that, even if gazebo and/or drcsim are built against Fuerte for use in the VRC, teams could very likely use Groovy in their own software, on both the team code machine and on their other non-cloud-hosted computing resources. As long as the ROS API exposed by the simulation machine isn't too exotic, the Fuerte-based simulation machine should happily interact with teams' Groovy software over the wire.

That would be another thing for motivated folks to try out: run drcsim as we've released it (using Fuerte), then interact with it from Groovy-based ROS nodes. The more that people know about possible hiccups with that setup, the better.