ROS 2 Galactic on Mac M1 with Monterey

I’ve finally been able to install ROS 2 on my M1 macbook pro.

Though I had to search a bit to get things to work, my two main sources were:

• Building ROS 2 on MacOS: The official ROS 2 guide for building from source on MacOS
• How to build and install ROS2 on macOS Big Sur M1: Kilmet Mamykin’s blog on building and installing ROS 2 — I’m shortening this to KM’s ROS 2 blog

Here’s an outline of the steps I followed:

• Had homebrew installed already
• Also had numpy and pillow installed but anyone who has issues can follow the instructions at KM’s ROS 2 blog

Getting Started

• Followed steps 1–6 here: building ROS 2 on MacOS: Install prereqs
• Ran into an error in step 6 with the package ast-typed. So I followed the instructions under install prerequisites here: KM’s ROS 2 blog

Getting ROS 2

• Now I was ready to get the code by following building ROS 2 on MacOS: get the code
• Before getting the sources as in line vcs import src < ros2.repos I made one change to the file ros2.repos:
  * I found the listing for the package mimic_vendor and changed the branch to master
  * This is because in my earlier attempts mimic_vendor gave me errors as in the github issue here
• Finally I ran vcs import src < ros2.repos

Building ROS 2

• I followed the instructions in building ROS 2 on MacOS: build the code
• But I ran into errors:
  * rviz_ogre_vendor gave me errors, so I downloaded the latest rviz version as a zip file and pasted it in src/ros2/rviz (overriding the previous folder) [possibly not smart but hey]
  * I also changed the line in file src/ros2/rviz/rviz_ogre_vendor/CMakeLists.txt from list(APPEND extra_cmake_args "-DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES='x86_64'") to list(APPEND extra_cmake_args "-DCMAKE_OSX_ARCHITECTURES='arm64'") (from the patches section in KM’s ROS 2 blog)
• Now I ran the colcon build command again
• But as stated in KM’s ROS 2 blog I ran into errors again! This time I had to patch build/rviz_ogre_vendor/ogre-v1.12.1-prefix/src/ogre-v1.12.1/OgreMain/include/OgrePlatformInformation.h
• So I followed the instructions in KM’s ROS 2 blog and changed the line # define OGRE_CPU OGRE_CPU_X86 to # define OGRE_CPU OGRE_CPU_ARM
• Finally I ran the build command again i.e. colcon build --symlink-install --packages-skip-by-dep python_qt_binding
• It took a while but things worked!!! 1 package failed but 303 of 305 succeeded

Running the talker/listener demo

• To run the talker/listener demo I first had to source the setup file as in building ROS 2 on MacOS: environment setup . /full-path-to-ros-folder/install/setup.zsh
• I was now able to successfully run the talker and listener
• Rejoice!!