Installation on Host

This tutorial will walk you through the setup required to make a computer ready to run the VORC simulations. In order to run VORC, your computer will need a discrete graphics card and will need to satisfy the minimum System Requirements.

Please check your ROS and Gazebo versions in the requirements above to avoid complications in compiling. You may want to uninstall existing versions of Gazebo.

Install prerequisites

The simulation uses some relatively new (as of winter 2019) features in ROS and Gazebo. It is therefore highly recommended that you upgrade the packages installed on your system:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt full-upgrade

Set up and install dependencies:

$ sudo apt-get install -y lsb-release gnupg2 wget
$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver 'hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80' --recv-key C1CF6E31E6BADE8868B172B4F42ED6FBAB17C654
$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-stable `lsb_release -cs` main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gazebo-stable.list'
$ wget http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
$ sudo apt update
$ DIST=melodic
$ GAZ=gazebo9
$ sudo apt install g++ cmake git ruby libeigen3-dev ${GAZ} lib${GAZ}-dev pkg-config python ros-${DIST}-gazebo-plugins ros-${DIST}-gazebo-ros ros-${DIST}-hector-gazebo-plugins ros-${DIST}-joy ros-${DIST}-joy-teleop ros-${DIST}-key-teleop ros-${DIST}-robot-localization ros-${DIST}-robot-state-publisher ros-${DIST}-joint-state-publisher ros-${DIST}-rviz ros-${DIST}-ros-base ros-${DIST}-teleop-tools ros-${DIST}-teleop-twist-keyboard ros-${DIST}-velodyne-simulator ros-${DIST}-xacro ros-${DIST}-rqt ros-${DIST}-rqt-common-plugins protobuf-compiler python3-colcon-common-extensions

Build VRX and VORC from source

The latest VRX repository contains updated code that are dependencies for VORC. If you have previous binary installations of VRX, you will still need to compile the latest VRX code from source.

We will compile the workspace using colcon, the latest and an improved alternative to catkin. If you are familiar with catkin build or catkin_make, they should work similarly, but the following assumes we are using colcon.

Create a ROS workspace and clone VRX and VORC repositories:

$ mkdir -p ~/vorc_ws/src
$ cd ~/vorc_ws/src
$ git clone https://github.com/osrf/vrx.git
$ git clone https://github.com/osrf/vorc.git

Source ROS:

$ source /opt/ros/melodic/setup.bash

Compile the workspace:

$ cd ~/vorc_ws
$ colcon build

Source the workspace (you will need to do this in each new terminal):

$ source install/setup.bash

Run the test environment:

$ roslaunch vorc_gazebo marina.launch