ISCAS Museum#

A detailed indoor Gazebo model of a multi-room museum hall — open galleries, connecting corridors, and walls with textured surfaces. It's a ready-made environment for testing navigation, mapping (SLAM), and obstacle avoidance without building a world from scratch.

This is a Gazebo model (a single static structure), not a full world. You spawn it into a world — add your own ground plane, lighting, and physics, then drop the museum in as the scenery.

What's inside#

File	Purpose
`model.sdf`	The model definition — a single static link with the museum mesh.
`model.config`	Fuel metadata (name, author, SDF version).
`meshes/ISCAS_museum.dae`	The COLLADA mesh — the museum geometry.
`materials/textures/`	Wall and floor textures referenced by the mesh.

Use it in your world#

The fastest way — reference it by URI in any world SDF. Gazebo fetches it on launch, the same way it pulls models from Gazebo Fuel:

xml

<include>
  <uri>https://assets.leetrobotics.com/1.0/leetrobotics/models/iscas_museum</uri>
  <pose>0 0 0 0 0 0</pose>
</include>

Drop that inside your <world>, alongside a ground plane and a sun:

xml

<world name="museum_world">
  <include>
    <uri>https://fuel.gazebosim.org/1.0/OpenRobotics/models/Sun</uri>
  </include>
  <include>
    <uri>https://fuel.gazebosim.org/1.0/OpenRobotics/models/Ground Plane</uri>
  </include>
  <include>
    <uri>https://assets.leetrobotics.com/1.0/leetrobotics/models/iscas_museum</uri>
    <pose>0 0 0 0 0 0</pose>
  </include>
</world>

Then launch it:

bash

gz sim museum_world.sdf

Use it offline#

Prefer a local copy? Download and extract the bundle, then point Gazebo at it:

bash

# Make a folder for the model in your ros workspace and cd into it
mkdir -p ~/ros2_ws/models/iscas_museum && cd ~/ros2_ws/models/iscas_museum

# Download and extract the bundle
curl -sSLO https://assets.leetrobotics.com/1.0/leetrobotics/models/iscas_museum/tip/iscas_museum.zip
unzip -o iscas_museum.zip && rm iscas_museum.zip

# Tell Gazebo where to find it (add to .bashrc to persist)
export GZ_SIM_RESOURCE_PATH=$HOME/ros2_ws/models:$GZ_SIM_RESOURCE_PATH

With the path set, you can reference it locally as model://iscas_museum inside any world.

Spawn a robot inside it#

Once the world is running, spawn a robot into the museum and start driving:

bash

ros2 run ros_gz_sim create -world museum_world -name turtlebot3 \
  -x 0 -y 8 -z 0.1 -file turtlebot3_burger/turtlebot3_burger.sdf

Good to know#

It's static. The museum has collision geometry but no joints or moving parts — it's scenery, so your robot's LiDAR and bumpers see the walls but nothing moves.
Add your own lighting. The model ships no lights; include a Sun (or your own <light>) in the world or the scene renders dark.
Mind the scale. The museum is large — leave room when you place the robot so it spawns inside a gallery, not inside a wall.

Attribution#

The museum mesh originates from the open-source ISCAS Museum model by Changkun Chai. Re-hosted here, bundled with its textures, so it loads in one step.