rclUE Greenroom Fork

• Heavily refactored
• Uses system installed ROS2 instead of included binaries
• Uses Unreal Engine memory allocator
• Reworked messages so the fields are accessible via Blueprints.
• Added thread safety to rcl calls.
• Remove Node and publisher initialisation complexity from Blueprints.

Basic information

Supported versions

• Ubuntu Jammy
• Unreal Engine 5.3 (This repo aims to track latest release version of the engine)
• ROS2 Iron with patched rcutils (https://github.com/Greenroom-Robotics/rclue-rcutils)

Windows is currently unsupported.

Installation

Install Unreal Engine

Follow Epic documentation on checking out and compiling Unreal Engine source code.

Install ROS2 Dependencies

• ros_core
• example_interfaces
• tf2_msgs
• geographic_msgs
• rcutils (with rclUE patch)

Add this plugin to an Unreal Engine project

1. Clone this repository in your project's Plugins folder
2. Create a shell script in the root Project folder to launch the Unreal Engine editor (substituting UNREAL_HOME, PROJECTS_HOME, ROS2_ENV and PROJECT_NAME for the appropriate paths):

#!/bin/bash

UNREAL_HOME="/home/${USER}/UnrealEngine"
PROJECTS_HOME="/home/${USER}/Documents/Unreal Projects"
PROJECT_NAME="MyProject"
ROS2_ENV="/opt/ros/iron"
EDITOR_COMMAND="${UNREAL_HOME}/Engine/Binaries/Linux/UnrealEditor"

source ${ROS2_ENV}/setup.bash
(exec "$EDITOR_COMMAND" "${PROJECTS_HOME}/${PROJECT_NAME}/${PROJECT_NAME}.uproject")

3. Within the Unreal Editor: Edit->Plugins, enable for rclUE
4. Change the world settings to use meters as units instead of the default centimeters

Getting Started

TBD