Configure ROS Environment

ROS, the robot operation system, is a flexible environment for writing robot software. It is not a traditional operating system but a software development framework including a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions to manage and reduce the complexity of robotic systems.

The following configurations are based on the following environment.

• base: raw Ubuntu 16.04.2 amd64
• ROS release: Kinetic (to be installed)

Configure package source and install packages

1. configure source

   Add apt package source list to system and use apt tools to manage ROS packages.

   • Official source

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

   • Mirror for China

     sudo sh -c '. /etc/lsb-release && echo "deb http://mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/ros/ubuntu/ $DISTRIB_CODENAME main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

2. set up keys

   sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-key 421C365BD9FF1F717815A3895523BAEEB01FA116

3. install packages

   • individual package

     ROS packages are named with prefix ros-<version> (for current version, that is ros-kinetic). Find package and get detail description of specific package using apt tools, like apt show, apt-cache search, etc.

     sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-<package name>

     Some packages of ROS are not included in any meta package and this is the only approach to install them.

   • base packages

     core package(communication tools), build tools as well as other bare bone packages. No GUI packages are included.

     sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-ros-base

     This is generally a recommendation for robot itself or computer without GUI enabled (using tty to interact with).

   • desktop package

     Include some of common GUI packages for desktop usage, also include full package list of base package.

     sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-desktop

   • full installation

     Include most components provided by ROS. This option is recommended for development on top of ROS infrastructure.

     sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-desktop-full

     (This is a huge list of packages, thus prepare a decent network environment and be patient to wait for the installation steps.)

The following content of this post is based on a full installation of ROS packages (using meta-package ros-kinetic-desktop-full).

Notice:

• ensure various kinds of sources are of Ubuntu source are configured, including restricted, universe and multiverse (which are selected by default);
• other mirrors are listed at Ubuntu Mirrors page of ROS wiki.

Initialize ROS Kinetic

After package installation, rosdep utility should be initialized before using ROS package, which can be done by following commands.

sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

In more detail, rosdep utility assists end user to manage system dependencies required by an specific ROS package. When compiling a ROS package from source which requires external packages other then ROS itself, rosdep can be used to configure system properly with dependencies installed. Currently, rosdep is a separated command line tool from ROS core packages (though generally, it will be installed when processing meta packages listed above). For more information about rosdep, refer to rosdep document site.

Setting up environment

Then, when launch ROS packages and interact with ROS node with various ROS utilities, a lot of command are required. To assist user input long names of various parameters, ROS provides auto-complete feature support for most widely used shell (bash, zsh, etc).

To config shell auto-complete for bash, add the following item to ~/.bashrc.

source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash

Or use bash script to configure this item:

echo "source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

To config shell auto-complete for zsh, add the following item to ~/.zshrc.

source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.zsh

Or usr zsh script to configure this item:

echo "source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.zsh" >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

Install additional packages

The packages installed above are those required to run core modules. When create new modules or explore modules by others provided in source code, compiling ros package is a required process. Thus, the following additional packages are required for configure a development environment of ROS.

sudo apt install python-rosinstall python-rosinstall-generator python-wstool build-essential