Choose a POSIM environment

POSIM runs on ROS 2 Lyrical and Gazebo Jetty. The source, issues and pull requests are maintained in IOES-Lab/POSIM. Choose your environment below.

Installation routes

• Ubuntu 26.04: POSIM Native Installation for a development source build.
• Apple Silicon Mac: POSIM Docker Guide for a Linux ARM64 candidate. This is not native macOS/Metal execution.
• Linux x86-64: POSIM Docker Guide for the AMD64 candidate. Specify architecture and digest explicitly.
• Windows: a Linux container/VM is a possible host route, but no new Windows clean-host certification is claimed here. Use the matching Linux image and check rendering/network access yourself.

GPU and display requirements

• World/robot headless Quickstarts can run without a Gazebo GUI. Camera/DVL rendering may still require a rendering context; server-only is not render-free.
• Candidate tests used software rendering. A successful CPU build does not imply that CUDA sonar was built or ran.
• CUDA sonar requires NVIDIA hardware, a suitable driver/toolkit, compatible renderer, and installed CUDA plugin targets.
• WGPU is experimental in POSIM PR #6, not in main or the published PR #5 candidates. Metal requires a native macOS environment; Linux Docker on a Mac does not expose native Metal.
• RDP/GUI, browser controls and QGroundControl need separate display/control setup. The ARM64 follow-up checked programmatic WebSocket joystick input through to simulated vehicle motion, not direct browser interaction, physical gamepads or current-candidate GUI/RDP. See POSIM Development & Release Status.

Resource and network considerations

Memory, storage and GPU needs depend on the chosen terrain, models and sensors. No newly measured minimum hardware specification is available. Allow space for Docker layers, the colcon workspace and Fuel assets. A cold-cache first run may download assets; save/cache the required resources before offline use. In the ARM64 follow-up, dave_integrated and dave_ocean_models became scene-ready after approximately 111 seconds and 90 seconds while fetching Fuel models. Network and cache conditions affect these times; they are not a startup guarantee.

Before running a command

1. Choose source main or a digest-pinned candidate image; do not mix their validation claims.
2. Source ROS and the matching workspace in each terminal.
3. Run one scene at a time and verify clock/data and clean shutdown.
4. Use POSIM Quickstart & Backend Support for the scope of the measured headless results.