LGSVL Simulator ROS 2 Bridge

The LGSVL Simulator can publish and subscribe to ROS 2 messages by connecting to the ROS2 LGSVL Bridge. This custom, native ROS2 bridge yields higher performance than the previously used ros2-web-bridge.

This document describes the installation process.

Installing Dependencies#

The ROS2 LGSVL Bridge requires the following packages to be built: - ROS2 (rcutils and rcl) - colcon - boost

Installing ROS 2#

See the official ROS 2 installation guide to install ROS 2. The choice of the distribution will somewhat depend on the Ubuntu version installed. Ubuntu 18.04 supports Dashing Diademata (dashing) and Eloquent Elusor (eloquent), with dashing being the LTS distro. Ubuntu 20.04 only supports Foxy Fitzroy (foxy), which is also an LTS distro.

The ROS 2 LGSVL Bridge supports Dashing Diademata and newer distributions. For Ubuntu versions older than 18.04, which would require older ROS 2 distributions, we suggest using ROS 2 docker images.

Installing Colcon#

Colcon is a command line tool that facilitates building ROS packages. To install:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-colcon-common-extensions

Installing Boost#

To install boost run:

sudo apt install libboost-all-dev

Installing the ROS 2 LGSVL Bridge#

Follow these steps to install the ROS2 LGSVL Bridge: - Clone the ros2-lgsvl-bridge repository from github:

    git clone https://github.com/lgsvl/ros2-lgsvl-bridge.git

• Source the installed ROS2 distribution in the terminal window:

    source /opt/ros/(name\of\ros2\distro)/setup.bash

• Switch to the correct devel branch for the installed ROS 2 distribution:

    cd ros2-lgsvl-bridge
    git checkout ${ROS_DISTRO}-devel

• Build using colcon:

    colcon build --cmake-args '-DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release'

Running the ROS2 LGSVL Bridge#

If the Bridge is already built, to run ROS2 bridge:

    source (path\to\bridge\repository)/install/setup.bash
    lgsvl_bridge