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Setting Up a Development Machine

Nick Walker edited this page Oct 11, 2017 · 3 revisions

Minimum requirements: ROS Indigo, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. You'll also need to ensure that your graphics card supports Gazebo and OpenGL. Be careful while running these instructions on a machine on which you need/intend to use a different version of ROS or Gazebo.

System Setup

You need to install ROS and Gazebo on the system side for the machine. The following instructions will need superuser privileges. You do not need to run these instructions on a lab machine.

Install Ubuntu

We've found that running Gazebo under a virtual machine generally performs pretty poorly. We recommend you dual-boot.

Download from: http://releases.ubuntu.com/14.04/ubuntu-14.04.4-desktop-amd64.iso.torrent or http://www.ubuntu.com/download/alternative-downloads

Install ROS Indigo

Follow the official documentation.

Note: lab experience has shown that ROS Indigo is only easily installed and run from Ubuntu 14.04. Using 14.04+ will most likely require building ROS Indigo from source and may cause other dependency issues and is not advised.

Install Dependencies

Now install all the necessary packages:

sudo apt-get install git ros-indigo-desktop-full python-rosinstall ros-indigo-roslint ros-indigo-cmake-modules gringo flex ros-indigo-sound-play ros-indigo-control-toolbox ros-indigo-eband-local-planner ros-indigo-map-server ros-indigo-move-base-msgs ros-indigo-smart-battery-msgs ros-indigo-moveit-* ros-indigo-segway-rmp ros-indigo-gazebo-*
sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

It is OK to see the error below while running rosdep init, it means that rosdep has already been initialized; run rosdep update instead.

ERROR: default sources list file already exists:
        /etc/ros/rosdep/sources.list.d/20-default.list
Please delete if you wish to re-initialize

When setting up an actual robot, define some custom device names:

source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash
sudo rosrun segbot_bringup udev_install

Then, reboot the machine.

Testing Gazebo

The ROS installation should pull in the latest version of Gazebo as well. Test the gazebo installation:

source /usr/share/gazebo/setup.sh
gazebo
Testing ROS

If you would like to test ROS, proceed to: Set up your user account

Dependency Error Resolution

When running code, CMake might through dependency errors. If this happens, what you generally have to do is simply install the dependency. Suppose you're missing a package called . To install it, you would run:

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-**<package>**

If the package name has any underscores, replace those with hyphens. i.e. package_name would be installed by running:

sudo apt-get install **ros-indigo-package-name**

Not all packages can be installed this way. As a general rule, if a package can be located in the ROS wiki (http://wiki.ros.org/) then it can be installed using this method.

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