How To Use Docker To Run Multiple ROS Distributions on the Same Machine

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is widely used in Robotics. But, the different available ROS distributions can lead to software version conflicts. For example, Ubuntu 18.04 uses ROS Melodic, based on Python 2.7. Ubuntu 20.04 uses ROS Noetic, which is based on Python 3. Oftentimes, our ROS master needs to be an older ROS version to have specific hardware driver support. In this article, I will show you how to keep a ROS Melodic master together with more recent ROS distributions on the same machine.