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 UE5.1.

  • 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. Please follow steps

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/_readthedocs/html/index.html

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

Maintainer

yu.okamoto@rapyuta-robotics.com