uuvsimulator installation on x86/amd64 with ROS Melodic and Ubuntu 18.04

Link to uuvsimulator Github and documentation. Link to REXROV2 vehicle for uuvsimulator

This was tested on an x86/ARM64 computer running Ubuntu 18.04 with ROS Melodic.

1. Installation

Install using:

sudo apt install ros-{$ROSDISTRO}-uuv-simulator

Currently uuvsimulator support kinetic, lunar, and melodic ROS distributions. This was tested on ROS melodic.

Create a new catkin workspace called TestUuvSim_ws. This assumes your catkin workspace is located in ~/Ros/Workspaces.

mkdir -p ~/Ros/Workspaces/TestUuvSim_ws/src
cd ~/Ros/Workspaces/TestUuvSim_ws/
catkin_make

Clone the rexrov2 and the uuv_simulation_evaluation package to the src directory and rebuild the workspace.

cd ~/Ros/Workspaces/TestUuvSim_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/uuvsimulator/rexrov2.git
git clone https://github.com/uuvsimulator/uuv_simulation_evaluation
cd ~/Ros/Workspaces/TestUuvSim_ws/
catkin_make_isolated

2. Launch the simulator

Source your setup.bash files. Note that your /opt/ros/{$ROSDISTRO}/setup.bash is probably already sourced in your .bashrc, if this is true, then the first line is not required (but won't hurt to include):

source /opt/ros/{$ROSDISTRO}/setup.bash
source ~/Ros/Workspaces/TestUuvSim_ws/devel/setup.bash

Launch the example configuration of the simulator

roslaunch rexrov2_gazebo start_demo_pid_controller.launch teleop_on:=true joy_id:=0