Installing MVSim on Ubuntu - tutorial

MVSim provides lightweight mobile robot simulation with native integration for ROS topics and messages. This tutorial shows how to install MVSim on Ubuntu from binary packages or source and verify the installation. After following it, you will be ready to launch MVSim demos and build custom worlds.

Area: simulation, capabilities | Content type: tutorial | Level: expert

Goal: Install the mvsim package on Ubuntu and verify it works.

Tutorial level: Advanced

Time: 10 minutes

Background

MVSim (MultiVehicle Simulator) is a lightweight, open-source simulator for mobile robots. It provides 2D physics-based simulation with 3D visualization, supporting differential drive and Ackermann vehicles, multiple sensor types (LiDAR, cameras, IMU, GPS), and native ROS 2 integration via standard message types.

MVSim is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license.

Prerequisites

It is recommended to understand basic ROS principles covered in the beginner tutorials. In particular, Creating a workspace — tutorial is a useful prerequisite.

You should have a working ROS 2 installation. Follow the ROS 2 install instructions if needed.

Tasks

1 Install `mvsim`

You can either install the released binary package or build from sources.

Run the following command in a terminal:

$ sudo apt install ros-rolling-mvsim

Create a ROS 2 workspace if you don’t already have one:

$ mkdir -p ~/ros2_ws/src

Source the ROS 2 environment:

$ source /opt/ros/rolling/setup.bash

Clone the MVSim repository:

$ cd ~/ros2_ws/src
$ git clone https://github.com/MRPT/mvsim.git --recursive

Install dependencies using rosdep:

$ cd ~/ros2_ws
$ rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y

Build the package:

$ colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Source the workspace:

$ source install/setup.bash

2 Verify the installation

Check that the mvsim CLI is available:

$ mvsim --version

You should see the installed version number printed to the terminal.

Warning

The mvsim package provides two executables:

mvsim: the main CLI tool for running the simulator standalone
mvsim_node: a ROS 2 node wrapper for running the simulator and connect it to other ROS 2 nodes

3 Launch a demo

To quickly verify everything is working, launch the warehouse demo with ROS 2:

$ ros2 launch mvsim demo_warehouse.launch.py

You should see the MVSim GUI window open with a Jackal robot in a warehouse environment. Use the keyboard (W/A/S/D keys) to drive the robot.

Summary

You have installed MVSim and verified it works by launching a demo world. In the next tutorial, you will learn how to launch different demo scenarios and interact with them through ROS 2 topics.