Issue: Simulation assets not loading during initial setup

[ani26052007]

Hi everyone, I’m Aneesh. I’m a Mechanical Engineering student currently exploring the Robotics Academy. I’ve been working on some personal projects involving drone control and estimation lately, and I'm really interested in this project and would love to contribute back to the community as I get more familiar with the framework.

I've been following the User Guide to get my environment ready, but I’ve run into a bit of a snag.

The Problem: I am trying to run a task, but the simulation world and assets are not loading. I have waited for over an hour, but the screen remains stuck. I'm trying to figure out if this is a network/latency issue or a configuration error on my end.

Environment Details:

OS: Ubuntu 22.04

Browser: Firefox

Exercise: Montecarlo Laser Loc

I'm eager to get this running so I can start diving into the exercises and eventually start contributing. Any guidance on where to look for logs or how to debug this would be greatly appreciated!

[ani26052007]

Update: I've managed to resolve this! I realized that I needed to manually press the "Connect" button at the bottom left of the interface to initialize the backend and load the Gazebo assets.

I also noticed that the current UI looks quite different from the screenshots in the User Guide. Since I'm new to the Academy and just went through this setup, I’d be happy to help update the documentation or README with new screenshots and a note about the "Connect" step to make it clearer for future users.

Please let me know if you'd like me to open a PR for this!