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.

3rd Party 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, pleas go to this page

to install any of the stacks here, do the following:

1. First, make sure you have SVN installed.

sudo aptitude install subversion

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

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

3. Then you can checkout the trunk 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:

IMAGEN

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 save the STACK name in another variable, like this:

STACK="bosch-ros-pkg"

finally, get the STACK..:

svn co $SOURCE $STACK

4. Now, edit your ROS_PACKAGE_PATH in your .bashrc (Replace <MY_STACK_NAME>).

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

In this example, that we are going to show the specific example of installing ros_comm

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

3rd Party from Bazar Repository

bla bla bla ...

Kinect

Intro to the Kinect

Install Drivers

bla bla

Test Demos

bla bla