Start the ROS 2 development containers

Understand the container environment

You’ll create and use two Docker containers built from the same image:

• The robot container runs the ROS 2 simulation, Zenoh router, and Gazebo environment used in this Learning Path
• The control container acts as a remote operator station for later Learning Paths

Each container provides an Ubuntu desktop that you can access in a web browser. You’ll use only the robot container to complete this Learning Path, but starting both containers prepares the environment for the rest of the series.

This setup is more than a container exercise. Gazebo, simulated camera and LiDAR data, Navigation2, RViz, and rmw_zenoh run together as a representative Physical AI robotics workload on Arm.

The environment uses official arm64 binaries without architecture-specific modifications.

Run the provided commands on your selected Arm server. After the browser-based VNC desktop opens, run commands with an ubuntu@robot prompt in the robot container.

Download the Docker Compose configuration

Create a working directory:

    

        
        
mkdir -p ros_zenoh
cd ros_zenoh

    

The Docker Compose configuration used in this Learning Path is available in the ros2-zenoh-arm GitHub repository .

Download the configuration:

    

        
        
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/odincodeshen/ros2-zenoh-arm/main/docker-compose.yaml \
  -o docker-compose.yaml

    

The Compose file defines the robot and control containers used throughout this Learning Path.

The configuration includes settings used later in this Learning Path and the wider series:

• shm_size reserves space for Zenoh shared-memory transport
• memlock removes the default memory-lock limit so Zenoh can allocate shared-memory regions
• NET_ADMIN applies network shaping inside the containers

Don’t change these settings.

Start and verify the containers

Pull the image, start both containers, and check their status:

    

        
        
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d
docker compose ps

    

Docker creates the container_volumes/ directories when it first starts the containers. Compose derives the container-name prefix from the ros_zenoh working directory.

The output is similar to:

    

        
        NAME                  STATUS
ros_zenoh-control-1   Up
ros_zenoh-robot-1     Up

        
    

The status of both containers should be Up.

Open the browser desktops and sign in with the password ubuntu:

• robot container: http://<server_ip>:6080/
• control container: http://<server_ip>:6081/

The container network uses the following addresses:

What you’ve accomplished and what’s next

You’ve started the browser-accessible ROS 2 environment and verified that both containers are running.

Next, you’ll configure the router and session files that rmw_zenoh uses inside the robot container.