Setup

This guide will walk you through setting up the simulation environment including Unity and ROS.

Start with a Ubuntu 20.04 desktop installation.

Unity Editor

Following the Unity Getting Started Guide to download and install the UnityHub.AppImage.

chmod +x UnityHub.AppImage
  • Run the file:
./UnityHub.AppImage
  • Login to UnityHub. If you do not have an account create a Unity account now.

Note: signing up for a student account, though not required, will give you access to some free assets: https://assetstore.unity.com/browse/student-plan-pack

  • Close UnityHub by hitting CTRL-C.

  • Install Unity Version 2020.3.17f1 by running the UnityHub.AppImage binary that was downloaded above with the version argument: unityhub://2020.3.17f1/a4537701e4ab, like so:

./UnityHub.AppImage unityhub://2020.3.17f1/a4537701e4ab

You can find a full list of archived LTS versions here: https://unity3d.com/unity/qa/lts-releases.

Then accept the defaults to install Unity, optionally installing any target build environments you may want to build for in the future.

Now, continue to setting up the Unity Project.

Unity Project

  • Clone the unity project, the location of this project is not important, but we'll clone it to the home directory:
git clone --recurse-submodules --remote-submodules https://github.com/yale-sean/social_sim_unity.git ~/social_sim_unity

In Unity Hub, add the project you just cloned by clicking the "Add" button.

Run the project by clicking on the project name: social_sim_unity

Note that if you are unable to add the project, create a new project by clicking the "New" button, restart Unity Hub, and then try adding the project again

ROS Setup

You can follow the ROS Noetic Setup Guide or use the Docker configuration below.

Preconfigured Workspace

It's easiest to use the sim_ws as a starting point for your catin workspace. Start by checking out the repository.

git clone https://github.com/yale-sean/sim_ws ~/sim_ws

Then run the installer scripts to install all required packages:

./scripts/setup.sh

Note: This script will checkout the code for you. If you run into issues, see the section on checking out the code.

Catkin Workspace From Scratch

If you did not use the preconfigured workspace, it's also possible to setup your workspace in ~/sim_ws from scratch.

Checkout

From with workspace run the commands found in the checkout.sh script

Build the Workspace

catkin_make -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Docker Setup

Instead of creating and installing a workspace from scratch, you can use our docker configuration to create a set of virtual machines in which the simulation platform can be run.

An advantage of this is that we also provide tools like a Tmuxinator configuration to easily start the necessary ROS components.

The Docker configuration is only tested on an Ubuntu 18.04 host machine with an CUDA compatible NVIDIA graphics card.

First, install the dependencies:

Also, don't forget to add your user to the docker group, as described in the Docker documentation post-install instructions for linux: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/linux-postinstall/.

To use the Docker configuration:

  • Clone the workspace into your home folder and cd into the workspace:
git clone --recurse-submodules --remote-submodules https://github.com/yale-sean/sim_ws.git ~/sim_ws
cd ~/sim_ws
  • Build the Docker containers
./container build ros
  • Start the containers with
./container start ros
  • Enter a shell in the Docker Virtual Machine in your ROS workspace
./container shell ros
  • Then within a container, run the checkout script to checkout the required repositories
./scripts/checkout.sh
  • Build the workspace:
catkin_make