Installing and Configuring Your ROS Environment

Installing and Configuring Your ROS Environment

In this part of the tutorial, you will learn how to install ROS and configure the ROS environment for development.

Note: Make sure you have set up your operating system, or are currently using running Ubuntu.

Installing ROS

Choosing a ROS Distribution

There are typically multiple distributions of ROS supported at any one time. You can check out the currently supported distributions on the ROS Distributions page.

Once you have selected your distribution, you will need to install it.

Setting Up Your Ubuntu Environment

First, make sure that your Ubuntu configuration is set to allow access to the "restricted", "universe", and "multiverse" repositories. This should be the case by default, but if not, you can follow the Ubuntu Repositories Guide for instructions on how to do so.

Next, configure your sources.list file to accept software from packages.ros.org. You can do this manually, or by running

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

Now, setup your keys using

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver 'hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80' --recv-key C1CF6E31E6BADE8868B172B4F42ED6FBAB17C654

Finally, update your apt package index by running

sudo apt-get update

Installing ROS Packages

Code in ROS is organized into so-called packages. Packages can contain libraries, executables, scripts, or other artifacts.

The ROS community has developed many useful packages already. You can find available packages using

apt-cache search ros-<distribution>

You can then install a package using

sudo apt-get install ros-<distribution>-<package>

Note: To start, we recommend you install the default set of packages for your distribution using

sudo apt-get install ros-<distribution>-desktop-full

This may take significant time to install.

For the remainder of these tutorials, we will assume you have all the packages from this set. If you do not do this, you may have to manually install some packages later.

Setting Up Your ROS Environment

Next, you will need to set up the shell to access these ROS packages. To do this, run

source /opt/ros/<distribution>/setup.bash

Note: This is referred to as "sourcing the environment".

Each time you open a shell, you will have to source the environment within that shell to use ROS.

To avoid this, you can add the command to your .bashrc file, so that it is automatically run whenever you open a new shell. You can add it manually, or by running

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

Note: You can verify that the environment variables have been set up correctly by running

printenv | grep ROS

You should see something like

ROS_ROOT=/opt/ros/kinetic/share/ros
ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=/opt/ros/kinetic/share
ROS_MASTER_URI=http://localhost:11311
ROS_PYTHON_VERSION=2
ROS_VERSION=1
ROSLISP_PACKAGE_DIRECTORIES=
ROS_DISTRO=kinetic
ROS_ETC_DIR=/opt/ros/kinetic/etc/ros

If not, you should verify that you have sourced the environment.

Creating a ROS Workspace

ROS uses the catkin build system. This means that a ROS workspace is (under the hood) a catkin workspace.

Creating a Catkin Workspace

A catkin workspace is a folder where you install, modify, and build catkin packages.

To create a caktin workspace run

mkdir -p ~/<workspace_name>/src
cd ~/<workspace_name>/
catkin_make

You should notice 3 directories within your workspace: src, devel, and build.

Just like how you sourced the environment for ROS, you will also need to source the environment for your workspace. You can do this using

source ~/<workspace_name>/devel/setup.bash

Note: You can add the command to your .bashrc file, so that it is automatically run whenever you open a new shell, however, you might need to modify it each time you change workspaces.

Building the Catkin Workspace

Each time you make changes to your workspace, such as when you add new packages, or make changes to existing packages, you should re-build your workspace, and re-source its environment using

catkin_make
source ~/<workspace_name>/devel/setup.bash

Using rosbash

Typically, your ROS code will be spread across multiple packages.

Navigating with command-line tools such as ls and cd can be very tedious which is why ROS provides tools to help you.

Most of these tools are contained within the rosbash package suite, which comes pre-installed with the default package set.

Next Steps

Now that you have installed and configured your ROS environment, you can create and build a ROS package.