Installing

From ROS 1 or ROS 2 repositories

Recommended: This is probably the easiest way to install MVSim and all the example files.

In Debian/Ubuntu systems, activate your ROS environment (setup.bash) if not done automatically in your ~./bashrc file, then just run:

sudo apt install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-mvsim

Check the build status table to find out what MVSim version is available for your ROS distribution.

Now, you can see first steps on how to launch demo files.

Note

You can also build MVSim ROS nodes from sources, by cloning into a catkin or colcon workspace and build as usual (catkin build or colcon build).

Build from sources

Clone the git repository, including the submodules:

git clone https://github.com/MRPT/mvsim.git --recursive

You will need these dependencies:

A decent C++17 compiler.
CMake >= 3.9
MRPT (>=2.5.6): In Windows, build from sources or get the precompiled installer.
Box2D (>=2.4): It will use an embedded copy (git submodule) if no (or too old) system version is found.

In Ubuntu, all requirements can be satisfied executing:

sudo apt install \
  build-essential cmake g++ \
  libbox2d-dev \
  libmrpt-opengl-dev libmrpt-obs-dev libmrpt-maps-dev libmrpt-tclap-dev \
  libmrpt-gui-dev libmrpt-tfest-dev libmrpt-topography-dev \
  protobuf-compiler \
  libzmq3-dev \
  pybind11-dev \
  libprotobuf-dev \
  libpython3-dev

Compile as usual in CMake projects:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make
#make test

Note

The instructions above will build the MVSim standalone CLI application, the C++ and the Python libraries. If you also want the ROS nodes, make sure of having your ROS system activated (having sourced setup.bash) at the time of invoking the cmake configuration (cmake ..). In that case, using colcon or catkin as usual is strongly recommended instead of manually invoking cmake. Just put MVSim under the workspace src directory as any other ROS package.