ROS on Mac/Windows

Before following the next two steps, install Docker (installation instructions for Mac or for Windows).

1. Setup

Open a new terminal in the Mac or PowerShell in Windows.

1. Once the terminal is open, clone this repository with the command git clone https://github.com/quattrinili/vnc-ros
2. Enter in the cloned repository folder, cd vnc-ros
3. Run docker-compose up --build

(ros.env contains environment variables for ROS that can be modified before running the command in step 3.)

2. Running a ROS gazebo simulation for testing

Once the other terminal shows the following type of messages and remains running without errors

 ⠿ Container vnc-ros-ros-1    Cr...                           0.0s
 ⠿ Container vnc-ros-novnc-1  Recreated                       0.1s
Attaching to vnc-ros-novnc-1, vnc-ros-ros-1
... (comment: more messages, with the latest being in the current version of Docker)

vnc-ros-novnc-1  | 2023-03-29 19:45:10,919 INFO success: xterm entered RUNNING state, process has stayed up for > than 1 seconds (startsecs)

(Note that there might be some slight variations of outputs, as long as the terminal is "occupied" by that command, you can go to the next step)

open another terminal:

1. Run docker-compose exec ros bash (docker-compose up has to be running)
2. Run source /opt/ros/melodic/setup.bash
3. Run roslaunch turtlebot3_gazebo turtlebot3_world.launch and you should see a number of messages, including [ INFO] [1617035063.438483400, 0.126000000]: DiffDrive(ns = //): Advertise odom on odom

To see whether it was successful, 5. Open your browser to localhost:8080/vnc.html and click connect. 6. The robotic simulator is now running in your browser.

3. To terminate

In the terminal open for step 2., press ctrl+c, which will stop the execution of the simulator. Once that is stopped -- you should see it as the terminal can accept commands -- press ctrl+d to exit the Docker container.

Afterwards, in the terminal open for step 1., press ctrl+c. Once terminated, you should see the following messages

Stopping mac-ros_ros_1   ... done
Stopping mac-ros_novnc_1 ... done

At this point, both terminals can be closed if you wish.

Editing your workspace

The workspace folder that gets created on your machine by docker-compose is where you can write and edit your packages. It maps to ~/catkin_ws on the Docker container. However, if you want to run catkin_make, do so by creating a bash via docker-compose exec ros bash and running catkin_make in /catkin_ws.

Installing other packages

Edit the Dockerfile line that installs packages and rebuild the container using docker-compose build.