Unity for ROS2

Introduction

This is a collection of projects (bindings, code generator, examples and more) for writing ROS2 applications for C# specificly targeted at Unity.

Platform support

This project curretly supports Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04. It should be possible to get it working on other systems as well.

How can I try this out?

There are some prebuilt binaries available for this project that can make it easier to get started. If you want to use custom ROS2 messages in Unity you will need to build the projects "Plugin binaries" from source in order to generate C# libraries for the messages. (See https://github.com/samiamlabs/ros2_dotnet for more info.)

Installing dependencies

The following steps describe how to install the example Unity/ROS2 project on Linux and Windows 10:

Windows 10

Install the standard ROS2 Dashing dependencies for ROS2 https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/Installation/

Chocolatey is a package manager for Windows, install it by following their installation instructions:

Install Visual Studio 2019

https://chocolatey.org/ choco install -y python choco install -y cmake python -m pip install -U catkin_pkg empy lark-parser opencv-python pyparsing pyyaml setuptools

Please download these packages from this GitHub repository.

Run in terminal as admin: choco install -y -s <PATH\TO\DOWNLOADS> asio eigen tinyxml-usestl tinyxml2 log4cxx

Download an OpenSSL installer from this page.Scroll to the bottom of the page and download Win64 OpenSSL v1.0.2. Don’t download the Win32 or Light versions. Add C:\OpenSSL-Win64\bin\ to PATH under System variables.

Ubuntu 18.04

You first need to install the standard ROS2 Dashing dependencies for ROS2 https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/Installation/

It is probably easiest to follow https://index.ros.org/doc/ros2/Installation/Dashing/Linux-Install-Binary/.

You don't actually need to install the ROS2 binaries, just the dependencies. (The required ROS2 dashing binaries are already packaged with the Unity project as Plugins). Installing the ROS2 binaries and running som examples is a good way to make sure that the dependencies are installd correctly though :)

Installing Unity

Install Unity through Unity Hub https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-hub-v-1-6-0-is-now-available.640792 (the download link changes sometimes, so look at the newest posts)

After downloading Unity Hub install Unity Editor follow this instruction https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/GettingStartedInstallingHub.html When choosing a version, choose the latest stable one. During installation, wait until the blue line is complete. NOTE: Tested with Unity 2019.2.8

Getting a Unity Project with ROS2 support

Option 1: Clone this repo

Just clone this repository to your local computer and open it accodring to the instructions below.

Option 2: Using the prebuilt unitypackage

Download the latest unityPackage for Windows 10 from releases

Running

The ROS2 integration in UnityRos2 requires that some enviroment variables are set. (This has to do with the finding and linking of .so and .dll binaries to C# code)

A script called start_editor.py (requires python3) sets these environment variables and starts the Editor. Don't use sudo. This is only way to start the Editor with ROS2 support at the moment. Opening the project through Unity Hub is not supported yet.

There is an example Scene named RosNavigationExample in this project for sending navigation goals to a turtlebot3 using the navigation2 stack. To start the navigation2 stack for turtlebot3, just run docker-compose up in the docker/turtlebot3_navigation folder of this repoistory. (Instructions for installing docker: https://dyno-system-config.readthedocs.io/en/latest/docker.html)

Tutorials

https://unity-ros2.readthedocs.io (outdated!)

Features

The current set of features include:

• Generation of all builtin ROS types, dynamic arrays and nested types.
• Support for publishers and subscriptions
• Quality of service profiles
• Time (limited support)
• Importing robots from urdf
• Laser scan
• Tf publisher
• Pose publisher
• Odometry (ground truth, no noise yet)
• Base controller
• Basic Navigation2 support
• Sending nav goals
• Path visualizer
• Keyboard teleop
• Tests
• and more...

What's missing?

Lots!

• Sending navigation missions
• Distance sensor
• Joint controller interface (only position so far)
• Joint state publiser
• Tf subscriber/visualizer
• Clients and services
• Setting individual element of array in message (need to assign complete array atm.)
• Actions
• Documentation
• More examples
• Better cross-platform support (Windows IoT Core, UWP, Mac) [should work with minimal modifications, but not tested]
• Automatic test runner for CI (C#)
• Costmap visualizer
• Camera sensor
• Camera viewer
• 3d sensor
• Pointcloud visualizer
• Video visualiszer
• ros2_control support
• Hololens support

Example Applications