Configure your Development Environment

Table of Contents

Install the Unity Editor
Clone the Project
Set Up the ROS 2 Environment
- Build the Docker container
- (Optional) Using an alternative ROS 2 environment
Continue on to Setting up the Unity Project

Install the Unity Editor

This project was most recently validated with the Editor version listed in the ProjectVersion.txt file. If you have a more recent version, it will most likely work fine, or you may download the exact version we used from the release page here. Note that if using a more recent version, you will receive some warnings to this effect when you first open the project, but you are fine to proceed through them.

Clone the Project

Check out the project using your method of choice, or simply copy the following line into a terminal with the git CLI installed:

git clone --recurse-submodule git@github.com:Unity-Technologies/Robotics-Nav2-SLAM-Example.git

Observe our usage of --recurse-submodules to ensure any dependencies are checked out. If you miss this part, you will need to use git submodule update --init --recursive later to download and update the submodules.

Set Up the ROS 2 Environment

This project should work with any appropriately configured ROS 2 environment, but we strongly encourage users new to ROS to build the environment from the Dockerfile provided with the project, which exposes a pre-configured ROS 2 environment to you via a built-in web VNC client. We may be unable to provide adequate troubleshooting support for other environments.

Build the Docker container

From the root of the repository, run the following:

cd ros2_docker
docker build -t unity-robotics:nav2-slam-example ./

This build process will take at least 10 minutes, depending on your download speeds and hardware specificiations, but you are free to proceed to next step while it is building.

(Optional) Using an alternative ROS 2 environment

If you prefer to use your own VM, or have ROS 2 installed natively and would like to use that instead, the colcon workspace for the ROS 2 side is located in the ros2_docker/colcon_ws directory. You can relocate this folder to your VM, or colcon build it directly from the workspace root. Note that you may need to use rosdep to ensure you have the appropriate dependencies in place before your build and execution will both succeed.

Continue on to Setting up the Unity Project

Once you're done configuring your environment to support this example, you can proceed to Setting up the Unity Project.

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