How to Set Up MoveIt 2 Docker Containers in Ubuntu

This guide will provide a walkthrough on how to get a Docker container with MoveIt 2 dependencies set up quickly. It includes a docker-compose config file that will get you up and running in MoveIt quickly! This guide is intended for people who would like to have a separate environment for working with MoveIt up and running quickly without having to do much configuring. In this guide, we will be setting up a ROS2 Rolling environment.

Learning Objectives

  • How to use docker compose to run MoveIt 2 Docker containers and tutorials

Requirements

Steps

1. Install Docker and docker compose (links are available in the Requirements section) and be sure to follow the Linux Post Install instructions. If you do not complete these additional steps you will need to preface all docker commands with sudo.

  1. Open a terminal session and download docker-compose.yml

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/moveit/moveit2_tutorials/main/.docker/docker-compose.yml

  1. Launch the container (you may need to hyphenate docker-compose if using compose V1)

    DOCKER_IMAGE=main-rolling-tutorial-source docker compose run --rm --name moveit2_container gpu

    You can replace DOCKER_IMAGE with other Docker image names, such as main-jazzy-tutorial-source or humble-humble-tutorial-source. This is based on the convention <MoveIt branch name>-<ROS distro name>-tutorial-source.

    Similarly, you can replace the gpu service name with cpu if you do not wish to run using NVIDIA GPU drivers and you can change the name of the container by replacing moveit2_container. The --rm argument will remove the container when you stop (or exit) it, otherwise you can keep your modified container on disk and start it using docker start moveit2_container.

4. You should now be inside of your Docker container, in the workspace directory, with the completed Planning Around Objects and Pick and Place with MoveIt Task Constructor tutorials. Go ahead and try one of the launch commands like ros2 launch moveit2_tutorials demo.launch.py.

If you wish to enter the container through another terminal, use:

docker exec -it moveit2_container /bin/bash

Further Reading

  • For more information about Docker best practices with respect to MoveIt, refer to this blog post from Vatan Aksoy Tezer and Brennand Pierce.

  • There are tagged images for rolling, jazzy, and humble which are built on top of MoveIt 2 Docker images here.

  • You can find more tagged images for MoveIt 2 Docker containers here. The tagged images coincide with ROS 2 version releases. The release version of the container provides an environment in which MoveIt 2 is installed via the binaries. The source version of the Docker image will build MoveIt 2 from source. You can use any of these images by substituting the DOCKER_IMAGE environment variable with a tag name from the above link (like main-rolling-tutorial-source), but you must use this docker-compose.yml instead (simply copy it to a different location and run your docker compose command there).