Dear ROS community,
The Webots development team is happy to announce that the webots_ros2 package is now compatible with macOS, including Apple Silicon! A Docker solution greatly simplifies the experience of users who use ROS 2 with Webots on macOS machines. This feature is available with the 2023.0.0 version of the package, which is only available on Rolling currently. It will step into Humble at the next sync. You can however already use it by installing the package from sources. The instructions are available here: macOS Installation Guide · cyberbotics/webots_ros2 Wiki · GitHub .
What is it exactly?
Until now, the package was never fully compatible with macOS and it was very difficult to install it and use it on Apple devices.
After adding the new compatibility with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) on Windows, we decided to implement a similar solution on macOS. The solution is based on Docker containers. This way, Webots is still run on the macOS host (to take advantage of 3D hardware acceleration), while the whole ROS 2 part can be run in a Linux container, which greatly increases the simplicity of maintaining and using the package and the possibility to use other ROS 2 packages.
How to use it?
The procedure to setup the Docker container with the webots_ros2 package and start the examples is available here: macOS Installation Guide · cyberbotics/webots_ros2 Wiki · GitHub .
The ROS 2 tutorial on setting up a robot simulation with Webots is now also compatible with macOS: Setting up a robot simulation (Webots) — ROS 2 Documentation: Humble documentation .
Want more details?
See the PR for more details: https://github.com/cyberbotics/webots_ros2/pull/485