Robotic Arm Simulation in ROS 2 and Gazebo

🚀 Migrated to ROS 2 Jazzy + Gazebo Harmonic — June 2026

This repository has been fully migrated from ROS 2 Foxy + Gazebo Classic (both end-of-life) to ROS 2 Jazzy + Gazebo Harmonic on Ubuntu 24.04.

The arm, the target sphere, and the full RL environment all run on the new stack. Everything below targets Jazzy + Harmonic. If you need the old Foxy / Gazebo Classic version, check the git history before this update.

General Overview

This repository shows, from scratch, how to:

1. Simulate a 6-DoF robotic arm (Doosan a0912 / m1013) in Gazebo and ROS 2.
2. Use a custom Reinforcement Learning environment to test the arm with your own RL algorithms.
3. Run a reacher task: the arm reaches a visual target (green sphere) that resets to a new random position each episode.

Prerequisites

You only need the platform installed first:

Dependencies

The apt command below installs everything else this repo needs — Gazebo Harmonic (pulled in by ros-gz), the ros_gz bridge/sim, ros2_control, gz_ros2_control, and the controllers. Safe to run on any ROS 2 Jazzy install; packages you already have are simply skipped.

sudo apt install ros-jazzy-ros-gz ros-jazzy-gz-ros2-control \
  ros-jazzy-ros2-control ros-jazzy-ros2-controllers \
  ros-jazzy-joint-state-publisher-gui ros-jazzy-xacro \
  ros-jazzy-robot-state-publisher ros-jazzy-rviz2 ros-jazzy-tf2-ros

Installation

Create a colcon workspace and clone this repository into its src folder:

mkdir -p ~/ros2_ws/src
cd ~/ros2_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/dvalenciar/robotic_arm_environment.git
cd ~/ros2_ws

Build

source /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash
cd ~/ros2_ws
colcon build
source install/setup.bash

Quick start

# Full RL environment: arm + target sphere in Gazebo
ros2 launch my_environment_pkg my_environment.launch.py

# In a second terminal — run a few random-action episodes
ros2 run my_environment_pkg run_environment

Test pieces individually:

# Arm only (spawn + joint_trajectory_controller)
ros2 launch my_doosan_pkg my_doosan_gazebo_controller.launch.py

# Arm in RViz with joint sliders
ros2 launch my_doosan_pkg my_doosan_rviz.launch.py

# Target sphere only (standalone)
ros2 launch my_sphere_pkg my_sphere_standalone.launch.py
ros2 run my_sphere_pkg my_client_node   # teleport it to a random pose

Packages

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