Installation: Robot Operating System

Install ROS Noetic and set up a catkin_ws where you can develop your robotics applications.

ROS Noetic

The Robot Operating System (ROS) provides the infrastructure for developing autonomous robots. It is a powerful tool in autonomous robotics as it is open source and applies to multiple programming languages including Python, Java, Lisp, and C++. For this course, we will be using a version of ROS called Noetic that is compatible with Ubuntu 20.04 and Python 3.

Follow this page to install ROS Noetic. Complete steps 1.2 - 1.4 in terminal. For the ROS install, we recommend you do the Desktop-Full Install or the Desktop Install.

Next, we will add this line to our .bashrc file, so that every time we open a new Terminal tab, this setup script is sourced so we can use ROS. If we don’t do this, we would have to run source /opt/ros/noetic/setup.bash for every Terminal tab where we want to use ROS.

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

Finally, follow step 1.6 from the above linked page. We have now successfully installed ROS.

Create a ROS Workspace

Follow the steps here to create a ROS workspace with catkin_make. This workspace is where we will write our code. Instead of creating the workspace in the home directory like mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src, create the workspace inside the BWSI_Student_Code repo that we created earlier.

Commit and push this workspace to your repo.

ROS Tutorials

More ROS tutorials can be found here.