• Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, 22.04
• Feodora 34+
• For rootless use, Podman must be preinstalled
• You need git and make commands installed for ROS containers to work.
• Optional but useful: Docker (can be installed for Debian/Ubuntu like dists with make install-docker in ROS containers)
• Optional but useful: Nvidia Docker if you have a Nvidia GPU: https://docs.nvidia.com/datacenter/cloud-native/container-toolkit/install-guide.html

It can be configured in a number of ways, below is a suggestion:

Edit or create ~/.ssh/config:

Host git.cs.lth.se
    Hostname git.cs.lth.se
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_gitcs
    IdentitiesOnly yes

Generate your key:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f ~/.ssh/id_gitcs

You need to add your key (~/.ssh/id_gitcs.pub) to: https://git.cs.lth.se/-/profile/keys

If you use a passphrase (simplifies access and the passphrase is stored in you keychain):

ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_gitcs

Valuable information about how to use ROS Containers exists in the repository readme: https://git.cs.lth.se/robotlab/ros-containers

git clone git@git.cs.lth.se:robotlab/ros-containers.git
cd ros-containers

There are many options, all start with use-. All use commands modifies config.env which you can modify in your favorite text editor aswell. Initially no config.env exists, it will be copied from config.env.template.

Quickstart for ROS Noetic and Docker:

make use-docker use-noetic

Quickstart for ROS Noetic and Nvidia docker (for GPU compute and acceleration):

make use-nvidia-docker use-noetic

Both above requires your user to have sudo access. If your user belongs to the group docker, you can instead use use-docker-rootless and use-nvidia-docker-rootless. Adding your user can normally be done with the command sudo usermod -a -G docker [your usernane].

If you intend to run this with a real robot:

make use-real

This adds –priviledged flag to when running the docker image. This means that it would then no longer be fully sandboxed. This allows among other things unrestricted access to USB devices which is commonly required for cameras.

More options are available in the documentation: https://git.cs.lth.se/robotlab/ros-containers and more specifically you can take a peep inside Makefile to see available commands.

make run

This will build the base image, a special user image where your user is known and mapped and finally a container to run it all in.

By default your home directory is mapped to home relative to ros-container repo root.

Delete your container to change mappings or otherwise clean out your environment:

make delete

If you exit your container/restart your computer:

make resume

This command will resume your container. Note: if the container is resumed in one terminal and you resume again, you will effectly use the same terminal interface in multiple terminals (they will be mirrored).

You should have succeeded in building the container and is inside it for below to work.

workspace init heron.rosinstall
workspace install

Two terminals or tmux/start roscore in background:

Terminal 1:

workspace shell
mon launch heron_launch simulation.launch

A note of behaviour, if you exit the first terminal you created with make run or make resume all others will be terminated with the exit of the first.

Terminal 2: New terminal running inside the container can be created with make terminal

roscore

Let say it is named custom.rosinstall, replace the name with whatever you want.

1. Copy your custom.rosintall to [ros-containers-path]/home or if using shared-home, to your user home directory.
2. In your home directory, run workspace init custom.rosinstall
3. This will clone all the repos described in custom.rosinstall

Note: workspace init autocompletes when pressing the [TAB] key, it combines central rosinstalls with local ones in your current directory.

By default ~/catkin_ws will contain a file current.rosinstall which was used to initialize the workspace. If you modify it, you can run workspace reimport to apply the new branches and clone new repos that did not exist before.

If you are using ROS2, it would be called ~/colcon_ws instead.

Note: workspace reimport will not move or remove repos - you will have to do that manually.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-apps

The files in the home folder (in the container) are by default available in home. But instead of opening that folder in your VS Code, a more convenient way is to attach VS Code to the container. You need to have the Remote Development extension installed in VS Code for this to work.

To attach your VS Code to the running Docker container, choose the Docker panel and right-click on the container to get a context menu.