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Installation (Ubuntu)

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 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-jazzy-mvsim

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.