Pan-African Robotics Competition (PARC) Engineer's League 2025 project development.
parc_robot_bringup: Contains config, world, scripts and launch files to bringup the PARC AgRobot for the autonomy task.parc_robot_description: Contains the URDF description files for the PARC AgRobot and launch files for the robot state publisher and description.
The Ubuntu environment and ROS2 workspace and packages are also available in a containerized environment using docker. The following subsections details the process of setting this environment. This was tested on an Ubuntu 24.04 computer, compatibility with Windows has yet to be confirmed.
This is required to enable use of the NVIDIA GPU in the docker container. Installing the NVIDIA GPU driver on your Linux distribution is a prerequisite before running the following commands.
Configure the production repository:
curl -fsSL https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/gpgkey | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/nvidia-container-toolkit-keyring.gpg \
&& curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/stable/deb/nvidia-container-toolkit.list | \
sed 's#deb https://#deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/nvidia-container-toolkit-keyring.gpg] https://#g' | \
sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nvidia-container-toolkit.list
Update the packages list:
sudo apt-get update
Install the NVIDIA Container Toolkit packages:
sudo apt-get install -y nvidia-container-toolkit
The container runtime is configured using the nvidia-ctk command:
sudo nvidia-ctk runtime configure --runtime=docker
Restart the Docker daemon for the changes to be effected:
sudo systemctl restart docker
Run the following command to pull the project docker image:
docker pull thenoobinventor/parc-eng-2025-ws:latest
Before running the container, there are a few things that need to be sorted out. First of all, setup the ROS workspace on your computer; choose a name for a workspace if ros2_ws is already in use.
Open a new terminal on your PC, then copy and paste the following one line at a time:
mkdir -p ~/ros2_ws/src
cd ~/ros2_ws/src
Next clone this project repository:
cd ~/ros2_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/PARC-Robotics/PARC2025-Engineers-League.git .
The container will be started using docker compose. The following changes will need to be made to the docker-compose.yml file. Under the volumes section,
volumes:
- '/home/noobinventor/ros2_ws/src:/home/ubuntu/ros2_ws/src'
replace noobinventor/ros2_ws with your PC username and the chosen workspace name on your PC, if it differs from ros2_ws, then save these changes.
While still in the src directory, run this command to start the docker container:
docker compose up -d
Open a browser tab and go to this address: 127.0.0.1:8080. You will be prompted for login credentials which are
username: ubuntu
password: mypasswd
The image below is obtained from running the autonomy track launch command:
ros2 launch parc_robot_bringup task_launch.py
To stop and remove the container run:
docker compose down
The volume setup in the docker-compose.yml file for the workspace src directory ensures that files in the directory persist after the container is stopped.
The full documentation for the 2025 PARC Engineer's League is available here.