This is an Apple Silicon adaptation of @quattrinili's guide here.

ROS on Apple Silicon

Before following the next two steps, install Docker (installation instructions for Mac.

1. Setup

1. Open a terminal and clone this repository with the command git clone https://github.com/jaismith/ros-apple-silicon
2. Enter in the cloned repository folder, cd ros-apple-silicon
3. Run docker-compose up --build

(ros.env contains environment variables for ROS that can be modified before running the command in step 3.)

2. Running a ROS gazebo simulation for testing

Once the other terminal shows the following type of messages

Starting ros-apple-silicon_novnc_1 ... done
Starting ros-apple-silicon_ros_1   ... done

open another terminal:

1. Run docker-compose exec ros bash (docker-compose up has to be running)
2. Run source /opt/ros/melodic/setup.bash
3. Run roslaunch turtlebot3_gazebo turtlebot3_world.launch and you should see a number of messages, including [ INFO] [1617035063.438483400, 0.126000000]: DiffDrive(ns = //): Advertise odom on odom

To see whether it was successful, 5. Open your browser to localhost:8080/vnc.html and click connect. 6. The robotic simulator is now running in your browser.

3. To terminate

In the terminal open for step 2., press ctrl+c, which will stop the execution of the simulator. Once that is stopped -- you should see it as the terminal can accept commands -- press ctrl+d to exit the Docker container.

Afterwards, in the terminal open for step 1., press ctrl+c. Once terminated, you should see the following messages

Stopping ros-apple-silicon_ros_1   ... done
Stopping ros-apple-silicon_novnc_1 ... done

At this point, both terminals can be closed if you wish.

Editing your workspace

To link a local workspace folder to your container, add the following configuration to docker-compose.yml under ros:

volumes: 
  - <LOCAL_PATH>:/root/catkin_ws/

This will link the provided path to ~/catkin_ws on the Docker container. However, if you want to run catkin_make, do so by creating a bash via docker-compose exec ros bash and running catkin_make in /catkin_ws.

Installing other packages

Edit the Dockerfile line that installs packages and rebuild the container using docker-compose build.