ROS Tutorial

Note: this tutorial is under construction.

Install ROS

To start using ROS meta operating system for robots, we recommend to follow the next steps:

1. First you must install ROS. There already exist a very good tutorial to do so, and when you reach the part where you have to decide which version of ROS you want to install, we recommend to select the BASE edition. "Base: ROS plus robot-generic stacks (e.g. navigation, visualization". The tutorial is in here(Install ROS Tutorial).
2. To get a quick and good tutorial for beginners see this page (BEGINNERS TUTORIAL). We recommend to read at least the beginners tutorials.
3. To start adding stacks FIRST CHECK if the STACK you want is in THIS List, If it is, you can install it easily by the next command, but be careful, because unfortunately, not all stacks in the list (but most of them) can be installed by the following method. The shadow_robot STACK it's one of them. You can install a specific ROS stack in the previous list just replacing underscores with dashes of the stack name with the following:

sudo apt-get install ros-cturtle-STACK-NAME

if your installation fails, then read the next section.

3rd Party Stacks & Packages installations

Source code, stacks and packages are stored in different repositories depending on who is developing the code. Must common repositories are the SVN and Bazar, so, downloading and installation are covered in this tutorial, but first, you must know how to identify these data.

When You are interested in a particular software, as showed in the beginners tutorial, you should search for the topic, and eventually, you will find yourself in a web-page similar to the one that is shown in the Figure below.

In the Figure, it is important that you recognize five features:

1. Application Name (Green). This name, shows the main functionality of the stack. Sometimes has the same name as the STACK name, but is not always the case.
2. STACK name (Magenta). This is the actual name of the STACK. the others that are at the right side of the STACK name, are the sub-stacks or packages contained in this STACK. So, before considering to install the stack, first check if you have it already installed.
3. Dependencies (Yellow). Before starting to install this actual STACK, is very recommended that you first have this stack-dependencies installed. Yes, this means that you have to track back all the dependencies until you find one with all dependencies already installed. (Ros Base has install for you many of the most common, so don't worry so much).
4. Repository (Blue). Acording to the repository, you will proceed to to the installation. In next subsection we will show how to do Downloading an installation of ROS-PKG (SVN) and Bazar repositories.
5. SOURCE or trunk link (Red). This is the branch for downloading the SOURCE code.

From ROS-PKG: SVN Repository

ROS-PKG is a community repository for developing libraries that are generally robot agnostic. Many of the capabilities frequently associated with ROS, such as a navigation library and rviz visualizer, are developed in this repository. To see the list of stacks of this Repository, pleas go to this page: ROS-PKG STACKS LIST

In this part of the tutorial we will show how to install the Perception_PCL STACK, but steps are the same for any stack from the ROS-PKG Repository. To install any of the stacks here, do the following:

STACK=perception_pcl

First, make sure that you DON'T have this stack or package already installed. In terminal enter:

rosstack find $STACK

In this case, as the stack has been not installed, there will be a reply. In the case that you have it already installed, the result will be the Directory in which you have the stack installed. You can also search if the code is declared as a PACKAGE, so look for it entering in Terminal the following:

rospack find $STACK

In this case, it will complain again. So, what is next step?... ensure that we have already installed the Dependencies. IN THIS SPECIFIC case, Dependancies are:

• common
• common_msgs
• driver_common
• geometry
• ros
• ros_comm

We know in advance that these stacks, are part of the default ROS Base, so you don't have to track back any stack or package, so we can continue.

Make sure you have SVN installed.

sudo aptitude install subversion

Create the Directory where you want to install the stack, and go there..

mkdir -p $HOME/Ros_Stacks/
cd $HOME/Ros_Stacks/

Then you can checkout the SOURCE (trunk link) from the svn repository listed in the wiki. The trunk if you are curious is the default branch of code in a svn repository, as opposed to the experimental branch. So, when you go to the STACK web page, you will see the something like in the Figure above.

You should pay special attention to the Repository and to the Source lines. The Repository line, indicates the name of the STACK and the source indicates the link to experimental stack. What we want, is to get the whole Stack, so, in order to do that, first, copy the link of the SOURCE line but delete everything after the word " https:......../trunk/ ". then in terminal, save it in a variable, for example:

SOURCE="https://bosch-ros-pkg.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/bosch-ros-pkg/trunk/"

Now that we have the STACK name and the SOURCE, we just do the following in Terminal

svn co $SOURCE $STACK

After downloaded, edit your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH in your .bashrc

export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=$HOME/Ros_Stacks/$STACK:$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH
echo "export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=$HOME/Ros_Stacks/$STACK:$ROS_PACKAGE_PATH" >> $HOME/.bashrc

Almost finish. To actually install the stack, you have to enter to the stack directory

3rd Party from Bazar Repository

bla bla bla ...

Kinect

Intro to the Kinect

Install Drivers

bla bla

Test Demos

bla bla