Mujoco Simulate App with ROS2 Integration

This package utilizes the pluginlib to make the simulate app from mujoco easily extendable. With this plugin support, mujoco_ros2_control is integrated to enable a flexible control interface of the simulated robot and sensors with the ros2_control framework. You can use this package together with the mujoco_ros2_control package to get a similar setup as the gz_ros2_control package for Gazebo.

The following environment and software versions are supported and regularly tested:

• Ubuntu 24.04
• ROS2 Jazzy
• Mujoco 3.9.0

Notes on design and maintenance considerations of this package:

• simulate provides a good out-of-box user experience and is sufficient for most applications. Thus, I try to avoid re-inventing the wheels (i.e. maintaining a different setup of the simulation loop and GUI).
• It's a lot easier to maintain a ROS-native version of the simulate app outside of the mujoco package. Minimum changes are applied (mainly the plugin support) to the original app and in general it doesn't require a strict version match with the main library.
• Future changes in the ROS part will be applied at the top (newest) of the git commit history. In case of a code sync of the simulate app, a rebase will be performed at the bottom (oldest) of the commit history. This strategy makes it easy to keep simulate up-to-date but the rebase will rewrite the git history.

Build the packages

It's recommended to clone and build the mujoco_demo_robot package to get a working example of the simulation setup. The demo robot model test_cart.xml is defined in mujoco_ros2_control and the mujoco_demo_robot package demonstrates how to start the simulation as well as the ros2 controllers.

cd <colcon-ws>/src
git clone -b 3.9.0 https://github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco.git
git clone https://github.com/rxdu/mujoco_sim_ros2.git
git clone https://github.com/rxdu/mujoco_ros2_control.git
git clone https://github.com/rxdu/mujoco_demo_robot.git
cd <colcon-ws>
colcon build --symlink-install

Now you can start the simulation with the demo robot.

ros2 launch mujoco_demo_robot cart_effort.launch.py

You can check the ros2_control setup by listing available hardware and controllers:

You can test the controller by sending a command to the effort controller:

ros2 run mujoco_ros2_control_demos example_effort