stonefish

BlueROV2 + ArduSub SITL on the Stonefish underwater simulator, running ROS 2 Jazzy inside a distrobox container on a NixOS host.

The container image pins Stonefish and stonefish_ros2 to v1.3 because that is what the stonefish_bluerov2 integration repo (scenarios + launch wrapper + UDP bridge) is built against.

Prerequisites

NixOS host with rootless podman enabled in the system config:

virtualisation.podman.enable = true;
virtualisation.podman.dockerCompat = true;  # optional

Then on the host:

nix develop                      # distrobox + podman + tmux in PATH

Setup

# 1. Build the image
podman build -t localhost/stonefish:jazzy .

# 2. Clone the things the image does not bake in
git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot.git
git clone https://github.com/bvibhav/stonefish_bluerov2.git ws/src/stonefish_bluerov2

# 3. Download QGroundControl.AppImage into qgc/
#    https://github.com/mavlink/qgroundcontrol/releases

# 4. Create the distrobox
distrobox assemble create --file distrobox.ini

# 5. Build SITL + colcon overlay inside the box (slow first time, ~10 min)
distrobox enter stonefish-jazzy -- ~/stonefish/setup-sitl.sh

Running

./run-sim.sh                                       # tmux: SITL (left) + Stonefish bridge (right)
distrobox enter stonefish-jazzy -- ~/stonefish/qgc.sh   # separate terminal

In QGroundControl, set the vehicle frame to Vectored-6DOF.

Detach the tmux session with Ctrl-b d; reattach by re-running ./run-sim.sh. Tear it all down with tmux kill-session -t stonefish.

Notes

• The /etc/profile.d/stonefish-ros.sh profile script inside the image scrubs PYTHONPATH and prepends the container PATH to defeat Nix devShell env leakage from the host.
• SITL ↔ bridge link is UDP port 9012 (BlueROV2). 9002 is the BlueBoat port.
• Stonefish v1.3 is missing a <cstdint> include; the Dockerfile patches StonefishCommon.h before building.