Embedded Motion Control/Tutorials/Installing and configuring your ROS environment

Description: This tutorial walks you through installing ROS and setting up the ROS environment on your computer.

Install ROS

In this project we will use the Robotic Operating System (ROS) which aids the testing and development of robot software. ROS provides a nice open-source framework for dealing with the communication between and management of different modules, and comes with a large amount of software that can be used out of the box, including device drivers, libraries, low- and high-level software, visualizers and more. More information about ROS and its goals can be found here.

To install ROS Groovy under Ubuntu 12.04, do the following:

1. Add the ROS Debian source to your sources.list such that Ubuntu knows where to download ROS from. Open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal) and enter:

   sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu precise main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

2. To be able to connect with the server, you need to add its public key to your keys:

   wget http://packages.ros.org/ros.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -

3. Make sure your Debian package index is up-to-date such that you get the latest changes:

   sudo apt-get update

4. Then, we can install ROS and some additional ROS packages we will need:

   sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-desktop ros-groovy-vision-opencv

5. Furthermore, you will need some additional ROS packages:

   sudo apt-get install ros-fuerte-pr2-controllers ros-fuerte-vision-opencv

If you ran into problems, be sure to check the installation guide on the ROS website.

Create a ROS Workspace

TODO

echo $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH

You should see something similar to:

/home/your_user_name/fuerte_workspace/sandbox:/opt/ros/fuerte/share:/opt/ros/fuerte/stacks