Installing and Configuration of ROS in your workstation

Installing ROS in your linux system is not that completed task. If you can follow the instruction properly it can be fairly easy. Just follow the steps listed below for installing ros-groovy in Ubuntu 12.04.

Step 1: Configure your Ubuntu repositories to allow restricted, multiverse and universe. It might not be needed to be done since it is usually already been made in the system.

Step 2: setup your source.list file. If you go to the etc/opt/source.list.d folder, you might find it empty if no other repository was added before. You need to add the ROS repository in the system by setting up your sourc.list. You can use it using the following command for Ubuntu 12.04 and ROS-groovy

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

Step 3: set up your keys for ros using the following command

wget http://packages.ros.org/ros.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -

Step 4: first you need to make sure your debian package index in up-to date. So run the command in your terminal

sudo apt-get update

after installing the updates. You can install ros-groovy full by running the following command

sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-desktop-full

it will take a good amount of time depending on your machines performance. You can expect 15-20 minutes to install all the packages. After the installation is done and if you want to run any ros command it will end up with an error “command not found”. It means since ros is installed in your system, it has not yet been configured properly for using. For configuring the system, follow from step 5

Step 5: Run the command

sudo rosdep init 

This is a one-time initialization command, once ros is working correctly, you will not need to revisit rosdep. For setting up rosdep in your account, run the command

rosdep update

Step 6: you need to setup your environment variables for ros so that it can locate the files it needs. To set the environment variable go to the folder where ros is installed. It should be opt/ros/groovy, and run the setup.bash file in that folder, giving the following the command

source setup.bash 

You can try to run ros commands now. Try running roscore, and see how it works. If it works perfect, your installation is good. You can install rosinstall which is a frequently used command line tools for ros. To install the tool, run the command

sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall

you are done, and good to go with your ros works.

The instruction video file is given with this tutorial. The video is having a typo where hydro is written instead of groovy. We apologize for the mistake, once a new installing will be done, we will change the video.