Setting up ROS2 Foxy and MoveIt 2 with Docker

Setting up ROS2 and MoveIt 2 on a local machine usually leads to dependency hell. It’s much cleaner to run everything in a Docker container.

I’ve been using a VNC-enabled image lately. It allows you to access the GUI tools through a browser. Here is my setup.

Start the Container

I use the tiryoh/ros2-desktop-vnc:foxy image. It has a built-in web VNC server running on port 80 (mapped to 6080).

Run this command to start it:

docker run -it -p 6080:80 --shm-size=512m tiryoh/ros2-desktop-vnc:foxy

Note: The --shm-size=512m flag is important. Without it, Rviz often crashes due to low shared memory.

Install MoveIt 2

Once the container is running, go to localhost:6080 in your browser. Open the terminal inside the VNC desktop and install the MoveIt 2 packages along with the Panda robot config:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y \
  ros-foxy-moveit \
  ros-foxy-moveit-resources-panda-moveit-config \
  ros-foxy-ros2-control \
  ros-foxy-ros2-controllers \
  ros-foxy-xacro

Run the Demo

To verify everything is working, launch the Panda arm demo. This will open Rviz and load the robot model.

ros2 launch moveit_resources_panda_moveit_config demo.launch.py

If you see the robot arm and can interact with the motion planning plugin, you are good to go. It’s a straightforward way to get a robotics environment ready without messing up your host OS.