MuJoCo ros2_control Simulation

This package contains a ros2_control system interface for the MuJoCo Simulator. It was originally written for simulating robot hardware in NASA Johnson’s iMETRO facility.

The system interface wraps MuJoCo’s Simulate App to provide included functionality. Because the app is not bundled as a library, we compile it directly from a local install of MuJoCo.

Parts of this library are also based on the MoveIt mujoco_ros2_control package.

Installation

This interface has only been tested against ROS 2 jazzy and MuJoCo 3.4.0. It should also be compatible with kilted and rolling, but we do not actively maintain those. We assume all required ROS dependencies have been installed either manually or with rosdep.

For configuring MuJoCo, the included CMakeLists.txt will download and install the tarfile automatically. As long as users have a good network connection there should not be an issue.

However, a local install of MuJoCo can be used to build the application by setting the following environment variables,

# The tested version
MUJOCO_VERSION=3.4.0

# Wherever it was installed and extracted on your machine
MUJOCO_INSTALL_DIR=/opt/mujoco/mujoco-3.4.0

From there the library can be compiled with colcon build ..., as normal.

URDF Model Conversion

Mujoco does not support the full feature set of xacro/URDFs in the ROS 2 ecosystem. As such, users are required to convert any existing robot description files to an MJCF format. This includes adding actuators, sensors, and cameras as needed to the MJCF XML.

We have built a *highly experimental tool to automate URDF conversion. For more information refer to the documentation.

Hardware Interface Setup

Plugin

This application is shipped as a ros2_control hardware interface, and can be configured as such. Just specify the plugin and point to a valid MJCF on launch:

```xml