MoveIt 2 Source Build - Linux

Installing MoveIt 2 from source is the first step in contributing new features, optimizations, and bug fixes back to the open source project. Thanks for getting involved!

MoveIt is mainly supported on Linux, and the following build instructions support in particular:

• Ubuntu 22.04 / ROS 2 Humble Hawksbill (LTS)
• Ubuntu 22.04 / ROS 2 Iron Irwini (stable)
• Ubuntu 24.04 / ROS 2 Jazzy Jalisco (Recommended LTS)
• Ubuntu 24.04 / ROS 2 Rolling Ridley (Continuously Updated. Use this to access latest features.)

In the future, we would like to expand our source build instructions to more OS’s, please contribute instruction write-ups to this repo.

These instructions assume you are running on Ubuntu 24.04 (Jazzy, Rolling). However, the same build commands should apply to Humble and Iron builds on Ubuntu 22.04.

Prerequisites

Install

Install ROS 2 Jazzy, or Rolling following the installation instructions.

We recommend Jazzy as the latest and stable LTS distribution, or alternatively Rolling for continuous development including contributions to MoveIt 2. Currently the main branch supports Rolling, Jazzy, Iron, and Humble (note that Iron and Humble will be phased out once incompatible, as we only ensure support for the latest LTS versions). However, since the main branch is used for development, the MoveIt API is not stable. For stable versions, please use the distro branches humble, or iron. A stable branch for Jazzy will be established soon as well.

MoveIt 2 source installation requires various other tools apart from what is already mentioned in the ROS 2 install docs.

sudo apt install -y \
  build-essential \
  cmake \
  git \
  python3-colcon-common-extensions \
  python3-flake8 \
  python3-rosdep \
  python3-setuptools \
  python3-vcstool \
  wget

Make sure you have the latest versions of packages installed:

sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
rosdep update

Finally, don’t forget to source the setup script.

source /opt/ros/$ROS_DISTRO/setup.bash

Uninstall Any Pre-existing MoveIt Debians

In ROS2, debians conflict with packages built from source. So, remove any existing MoveIt debians:

sudo apt remove ros-$ROS_DISTRO-moveit*

Create Workspace and Source

Create a colcon workspace:

export COLCON_WS=~/ws_moveit2/
mkdir -p $COLCON_WS/src
cd $COLCON_WS/src

Download Source Code

Download the repository and install any dependencies. Issue the relevant commands for your ROS distribution.

Humble, Iron -stable

git clone https://github.com/moveit/moveit2.git -b $ROS_DISTRO
for repo in moveit2/moveit2.repos $(f="moveit2/moveit2_$ROS_DISTRO.repos"; test -r $f && echo $f); do vcs import < "$repo"; done
rosdep install -r --from-paths . --ignore-src --rosdistro $ROS_DISTRO -y

Rolling, Jazzy, Iron, Humble -unstable

git clone https://github.com/moveit/moveit2.git -b main
for repo in moveit2/moveit2.repos $(f="moveit2/moveit2_$ROS_DISTRO.repos"; test -r $f && echo $f); do vcs import < "$repo"; done
rosdep install -r --from-paths . --ignore-src --rosdistro $ROS_DISTRO -y

Middleware

We recommend CycloneDDS as a middleware. Note: this makes all nodes started using this RMW incompatible with any other nodes not using Cyclone DDS.

sudo apt install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-rmw-cyclonedds-cpp
export RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_cyclonedds_cpp

You may want to add export RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_cyclonedds_cpp to your ~/.bashrc to source it automatically.

Build MoveIt

The rest of the commands are same for every distribution.

Configure and build the workspace:

cd $COLCON_WS
colcon build --event-handlers desktop_notification- status- --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

Source the Colcon Workspace

Setup your environment - you can do this every time you work with this particular source install of the code, or you can add this to your .bashrc (recommended):

source $COLCON_WS/install/setup.bash

Quick Start

Check out the MoveIt 2 Tutorials on how to get started with simple demo packages.

MoveIt 2 Tutorials