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simulation

README.md

Simulation

This directory contains the SMaRC simulation environment submodules.

  • These are not ROS packages.
  • These are submodules.
  • They can be cloned and used independently of the rest of the smarc2 repository.

SMARCUnity

The three submodules that start with SMARCUnity are meant to be used as Unity projects (HDRP, Standard) or packages (Assets). Check their individual READMEs for details specific to each.

Documentation of the simulation components, methods, vehicles, systems etc. are inside the Assets submodule where the code for most of it lives.

The packages

Assets: Common package that contains all the sensors, prefabs, vehicles, etc. Should be imported from the package manager in Unity. This is where MOST of the useful things are.

HDRP: Uses the High Def. Render Pipeline to produce some good looking water and realistic waves. Runs fast enough for realtime usage while looking pretty. Requires a decent GPU to run smoothly.

Standard: Uses the "Unity Standard" rendering pipeline, trading graphical fidelity for speed. If you need to do some reinforcement learning or similar "try a million times" approaches, this is the way to go. This version can also be very easily ran without graphics.

First time installation

  • Clone SMARCUnityHDRP and/or SMARCUnityStandard (referred to as "the project" going forward) and SMARCUnityAssets (Assets) repositories into the the same folder.
    • The project is configured to access Assets as a sibling.
    • If you want to arrange them differently, you will need to modify the manifest.json file in TheProject/Packages to point to wherever you placed Assets.
    • Do not place Assets inside the project.
  • Open Unity Hub
    • Add -> Project from disk.
    • Locate the project.
    • If it tells you "you do not have the right editor version" choose "download".
    • It will take a bit of time to compile everything for the first time, let it be.
    • The project should now appear in the hub going forward.

You can also acquire the latest released binaries from the releases section of github. These are usually outdated, but likely more stable. If you encounter bugs here, try a cloned version first.

ROS connection

  • Both the Standard and HDRP versions use the ROS-TCP-Endpoint package to speak to ROS2.
    • You can use this simple script to run the bridge and then use rviz2 and rqt to check what things look like in ROS.
  • The ROS connection is especially useful when you are running headless.

ROS Messages

These are generated from within the editor:

  • Robotics -> Generate ROS Messages...
  • Fill in the fields in the pop-up
    • Usually you can not generate these INTO the SMARCUnityAssets package, so place the RosMessages folder anywhere for now
  • Cut/Paste the generated RosMessages folder into SMARCUnityAssets/Runtime/Scripts/VehicleComponents/ROS/Core/RosMessages

Running headless

This was only tested with the Standard setup.

In general, this will run the sim in the command line: ./<name_of_exec> -nographics -batchmode

If you are running in docker(with our image), this works just as well. The executables should be availble in this directory already. You could either run the sim directly with build/exec or run bash and run it yourself manually.

Since this runs wihtout graphics, the only practical way to interact with the sim is over ROS. To do so, run the unity bridge node in the same container/machine and check the topics as you would normally (probably in a third terminal).

End to end docker example

See the docker readme!

Running on Macs with ROS

Intel-based macs should just use a VM of Ubuntu 22.04 if ROS is desired, otherwise all packages can be run within MacOS and the following part can be ignored.

Apple silicon macs can do the following to get the sim + ros working. This is due to a lack of apple-silicon-compiled Ubuntu version of Unity (you can see how that is a horrible combination).

Do these to get stuff running:

  • Either use docker or a VM to get Ubunbtu 22.04 and all the ROS stuff.
    • This part will work fine because you will be compiling things on the apple silicon.
    • If you followed the docker example, the sim in docker WONT run. Because the binaries are for x86 systems and you are on apple.
  • Install Unity Hub on mac.
    • Get personal license.
    • No need to install an editor at this point.
  • Clone the project and assets as described above
    • Open the project.
    • Robotics -> ROS Settings
      • Change ROS IP and Port to whatever your docker/VM is using.
  • You should now be able to follow the other readmes. Don't forget to change the ROS IP in unity_ros2_bridge.sh accordingly.