The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) provides a number of ROS Docker images for different releases and packages configurations. This tutorial shows how such images can be used with Luffer to quickly setup a ROS development environment.
You must have Docker and Luffer installed on your system before proceeding.
To download a full install of the latest ROS release (Noetic at time of writing), you can do:
$ docker pull osrf/ros:noetic-desktop-full
This particular version will be used in all further examples, but you can easily tailor them to your preference.
Next, create a new tag to the downloaded image:
$ docker tag osrf/ros:noetic-desktop-full ros/noetic:osrf
This will make it easier to use Luffer's default ROS configuration files on the downloaded image, as will be explained below.
To instantiate the ROS image and connect it to your current shell session on the host, use the command below:
$ luffer plug ros/noetic:osrf
(ros/noetic:osrf) $
This will also load the extra settings included in $LUFFER_HOME/ros/host.bashrc, which specifies a number of aliases to common ROS commands, for example:
alias catkin_create_pkg='luffer exec catkin_create_pkg'
alias catkin_init_workspace='luffer exec catkin_init_workspace'
alias catkin_make='luffer exec catkin_make'
alias roscore='luffer exec roscore'
alias roslaunch='luffer exec roslaunch'
alias rosmsg='luffer exec rosmsg'
alias rosnode='luffer exec rosnode'
alias rosrun='luffer exec rosrun'
alias rostopic='luffer exec rostopic'
As explained in the Luffer documentation, this means that calling those commands in the host session will invoke them on the running container, e.g. calling:
(ros/noetic:osrf) $ roscore
Will call the roscore command on the container. Any command not in the alias list can still be invoked on the container using the luffer exec command, for example:
(ros/noetic:osrf) $ luffer exec rosdep update
Depending on your pruposes, you may want to customize the original ROS image with extra packages, etc. This can be done in Luffer using the luffer sudo command to run root-mode commands on the container, for example:
(ros/noetic:osrf) $ luffer sudo apt-get update
(ros/noetic:osrf) $ luffer sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-controller-manager \
ros-noetic-gazebo-ros-control \
ros-noetic-joint-state-controller \
ros-noetic-effort-controllers
This will update APT's package list and install the above ROS packages on the container.
Depending on your host configuration, you may also have to install extra video drivers on the image. For example, in my system I have the nvidia-375 package installed on the host, so in order for 3D graphics to work on the running container I also need the same drivers installed there:
(ros/noetic:osrf) $ luffer sudo apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends nvidia-375
Once you're done with customizations, exit the session to terminate the container and commit changes to a new image:
(ros/noetic:osrf) $ exit
$ luffer commit ros/noetic:custom001
Saving changes to a new image makes it easier to rollback them later if needed, simply by removing the latest image and starting over from the previous version.
One difficulty using Luffer for ROS development is the need to source devel/setup.sh in order to update the $PATH and other environment parameters. Configuration file $LUFFER_HOME/ros/exec.bashrc gets around this by adding source devel/setup.sh to the execution setup when a command is ran from a workspace base folder.