ros-ec2-setup

List of 3 scripts to prepare a stock Ubuntu AMI on AWS to act as a remote workstation, including 3D acceleration (when used with a GPU instance).

The scripts (located under scripts/) take care of installing Lubuntu, TurboVNC, VirtualGL, Nvidia drivers.

Motivation

I wanted to develop multi robot application. But to have multi phisycal robots takes time and costs. So I moved to simulator on EC2.

However, to run it on EC2 and use with remote desktop is a bit complecated because of OpenGL and VNC. This tools help you to build such environment.

Installation

I've tested the scripts with a basic Ubuntu 16.04 image on a G2 instance. Also I tested a T3 instance, so it means you can choose if you use GPU acceleration or not.

The first step is to run the install.sh script:

$ source install.sh

The machine will reboot at the end of the process. You'll have to wait a bit and then reconnect to it.

Then, for a G2 instance:

(You can skip this if you are NOT using G2 instances.)

$ source install-nvidia-drivers-g2.sh

Usage

Now you can just run the startup.sh script to initiate the X server and launch VNC on PORT 5901 (the first time, it will ask you to create a password for the VNC server).

If you reboot your instance, or if you decide to save a snapshot of your instance and use it as an image for future instances, then all you need is to run startup.sh once the instance is up.

When connecting, I prefer to only open PORT 22 on the instance, and create an SSH tunnel for VNC like so:

$ ssh -i permission_file.pem -L 5901:localhost:5901 ubuntu@ip_address

Then I can use a VNC client to connect to localhost:5901.

You can also open PORT 5901 on your instance and directly connect to it, but the connection won't be encrypted...

Make sure to use a VNC client that supports VirtualGL (TigerVNC, TurboVNC, ...). Once you're in, you'll have a full Lubuntu desktop with hardware acceleration!

If you wish to view your desktop in the browser, you need to uncomment the final line in the startup.sh script to run a noVNC server and then create an SSH tunnel for PORT 6080:

$ ssh -i permission_file.pem -L 6080:localhost:6080 ubuntu@ip_address

You can access your desktop in the browser at localhost:6080/vnc.html.

To take advantage of VirtualGL, launch your 3D applications prepended by vglrun. For example:

$ vglrun firefox

And visit http://webglreport.com/ to check that you're effectively using the Nvidia hardware :-)

Launch ROS applications!

For example, you can do something like:

$ vglrun roslaunch turtlebot3_gazebo turtlebot3_world.launch

Note: You have to install ROS.

Pre-built AMI?

Currently working on this. Will be available soon.