Acropolis has reached end-of-life on September 2019. This page exists for archival purposes. Please refer to the latest supported version.

Acropolis Installation#

Acropolis supports the following platforms:

Ubuntu Bionic on amd64/i386
MacOS Mojave

Windows support is still experimental although most of the packages should work as expected. There are no binaries for Windows at this moment. The gz-sim package is still not available for Windows, the installation should be done from source code.

Acropolis Libraries#

The Acropolis collection is composed by many different Gazebo libraries. The collection assures that all libraries all compatible and can be used together.

Library name	Version
gz-cmake	2.x
gz-common	3.x
gz-fuel-tools	3.x
gz-sim	1.x
gz-gui	1.x
gz-launch	0.x
gz-math	6.x
gz-msgs	3.x
gz-physics	1.x
gz-plugin	1.x
gz-rendering	1.x
gz-sensors	1.x
gz-tools	0.x
gz-transport	6.x
sdformat	8.x

Option 1: Installation on Ubuntu Bionic#

All of the Acropolis binaries are hosted in the osrfoundation repository. To install all of them, the metapackage gazebo-acropolis can be installed:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-stable `lsb_release -cs` main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gazebo-stable.list'
wget http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gazebo-acropolis

All libraries should be ready to use and the gz-sim app ready to be executed.

Option 2: Install on MacOS Mojave (10.14)#

All the Acropolis binaries are available in Mojave using the homebrew package manager. The homebrew tool can easily be installed using:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)"

After installing the homebrew package manager, Gazebo Acropolis can be installed running:

brew tap osrf/simulation
brew install gazebo-acropolis

All libraries should be ready to use and the gz-sim app ready to be executed.

Option 3: Source Installation (any platform)#

The use of some additional tools is recommended to help with the source compilation, although other ways of correctly getting and building the sources are also possible.

Colcon supports python 3.5 (or higher) which is not the default option in some platforms (like Ubuntu Bionic). The python virtualenv could be a useful solution in cases where the default option can not be easily changed.

Installing vcstool and colcon#

For getting the sources of all libraries the easiest way is to use vcstool. The tool is available from pip in all platforms:

pip install vcstool

To compile all the different libraries and gz-sim in the right order it is recommended to use colcon. The colcon tool is available in all platforms using pip:

pip install -U colcon-common-extensions

Use .deb packages in Ubuntu to install vcstool and colcon#

An alternative method is to use the .deb packages available on Debian or Ubuntu:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

sudo apt-get install curl # if curl isn't already installed
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/ros.asc | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install python3-vcstool python3-colcon-common-extensions

Getting the sources#

The instructions below use some UNIX commands to manage directories but the obvious alternatives on Windows should provide the same result.

The first step would be to create a developer workspace in which vcstool and colcon can work.

mkdir -p ~/workspace/src
cd ~/workspace/src

All the sources of gazebo-acropolis are declared in a yaml file. Download it to the workspace.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gazebo-tooling/gazebodistro/master/collection-acropolis.yaml

Use vcstool to automatically retrieve all the Gazebo libraries sources from their repositories:

vcs import < collection-acropolis.yaml

The src subdirectory should contain all the sources ready to be built.

Install dependencies#

Before compiling it is necessary to install all the dependencies of the diferent packages that compose the Acropolis collection. Every platform has a different method to install software dependencies.

To add packages.osrfoundation.org to your apt sources list:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-stable `lsb_release -cs` main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gazebo-stable.list'
wget http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update

As reference the command below will install all dependencies in Ubuntu Bionic:

sudo apt-get install cmake freeglut3-dev libavcodec-dev libavdevice-dev libavformat-dev libavutil-dev libdart6-collision-ode-dev libdart6-dev libdart6-utils-urdf-dev libfreeimage-dev libgflags-dev libglew-dev libgts-dev libogre-1.9-dev libogre-2.1-dev libprotobuf-dev libprotobuf-dev libprotoc-dev libqt5core5a libswscale-dev libtinyxml2-dev libtinyxml-dev pkg-config protobuf-compiler qml-module-qt-labs-folderlistmodel qml-module-qt-labs-settings qml-module-qtquick2 qml-module-qtquick-controls qml-module-qtquick-controls2 qml-module-qtquick-dialogs qml-module-qtquick-layouts qtbase5-dev qtdeclarative5-dev qtquickcontrols2-5-dev ruby ruby-ronn uuid-dev libgtest-dev curl libcurl4-gnutls-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libsqlite3-dev

Building the Gazebo Libraries#

The Gazebo Libraries require the following compilers on each platform:

Ubuntu Bionic: gcc 8
MacOS Mojave: Xcode 10
Windows: Visual Studio 2017

Installing gcc version 8 on Ubuntu Bionic#

To install gcc version 8 on Ubuntu Bionic:

sudo apt-get install g++-8

Set gcc-8 and g++-8 to be the default compilers.

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/gcc gcc /usr/bin/gcc-8 800 --slave /usr/bin/g++ g++ /usr/bin/g++-8 --slave /usr/bin/gcov gcov /usr/bin/gcov-8

At this point gcc and g++ should both report version 8. Test this with the following commands.

gcc -v
g++ -v

Building the colcon workspace#

Once the compiler and all the sources are in place it is time to compile them. Start the procedure by changing into the workspace and listing the packages recognized by colcon:

cd ~/workspace/
colcon list -g

colcon should list the Gazebo libraries with their interdependencies. If that is the case, then you are ready to build the whole set of libraries:

colcon build

If there are no errors, all the binaries should be ready to use.

Using the workspace#

The workspace binaries are ready but every time that gz-sim needs to be executed or third party code is going to be developed using the Gazebo libraries, one command is needed:

. ~/workspace/install/local_setup.bash
(or call ~/workspace/install/local_setup.bat on Windows)

After running the command all paths for running apps or developing code will be set in the current shell.