Basic information

Online documentation

https://rclUE.readthedocs.io/en/devel/

Supported versions

Main support

  • Ubuntu 20.04

  • Unreal Engine 5.1

  • ROS2 Foxy

  • Clang: 13.0.1

Maintenance/experimental

  • ROS2 Humble(UE5_devel_humble branch)

  • UE4.27: 11.0.1

  • Clang: 11.0.1

Please download UE5.1 for Linux by following Unreal Engine for Linux

Branches

  • devel: This build of the plugin is based on ROS2 Foxy and has been tested on Ubuntu 20 and UE5.1.

  • UE5_devel_humble_20.04(experimental): This build of the plugin is based on ROS2 humble and has been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 and UE5.10.

  • UE5_devel_humble(experimental): This build of the plugin is based on ROS2 humble, Ubuntu 22.04 and UE5.1.

Other branches

Experimental and WIP

rclUE and ROS2

Description

  • We use ros2 ‘foxy’ lightweighted (not all binaries are included). Source/ThirdParty/ros folder is fully autogenerated by UE_tools

  • ros includes UE_msgs

  • UE uses centimeters but ROS uses meters. Please convert manually or use URRConversionUtils in RapyutaSimulationPlugins

  • within the Unreal Editor: Edit->Plugins, search and enable for rclc

Windows is currently unsupported

Getting Started

The plugin folder contains a video “Example_BP_PubSub.mp4” demonstrating how to setup a PubSub example in Blueprint.

An example setup using this plugin can be found at turtlebot3-UE

Notes on working with ROS2 and UE

  • rcl and void* types cannot be managed by UE (no UPROPERTY) and therefore can’t be used directly in Blueprint. Whenever access to these variables is needed, the user should write a class to wrap it and all of their handling must be done in C++.

  • some basic numerical types are not natively supported in Blueprint (e.g. double, unsigned int). In order to use these, a workaround is needed (a plugin implementing those types for BP, a modified UE or a custom implementation).

  • In autogenerated messages, the method MsgToString() should be implemented by the user as its current purpose is to help debugging.

How to update ROS inside RclUE

Currently there is a scripts in UE_tools to automatically build and update ROS2 libraries. Follow steps 1) for building and copying ros2 base library under rclUE and 2) for generating UE src codes to access msg from UE. Please check UE_tools README and UE_tools/default_config.yaml

git clone https://github.com/rapyuta-robotics/UE_tools
cd UE_tools

# build and copy ros2 base libraries
python3 build_install_codegen.py -b --remove --type base

# Generate msg classes to access msg from UE
python3 build_install_codegen.py -bc --type pkgs

Install pre-commit

Please install pre-commit before commiting your changes. Follow this instruction https://pre-commit.com/

then run

pre-commit install

Documentation

Tools

documentation is built with three tools

Locally build

  1. install tools in #tools section.

  2. build

    cd docs
make --always-make html

  3. Open following in your browser.

    • Sphinx at file:///<path to cloned repo>/docs/source/_build/html/index.html

    • Original doxygen output at file:///<path to cloned repo>/docs/source/_build/html/doxygen_generated/html/index.html

Maintainer

yu.okamoto@rapyuta-robotics.com