ROS Tutorials

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Aside to editor, to improve:

This tutorial assumes that you will be working in ROS-hydro on Ubuntu 12.04. This wiki is based on the tutorials given here.

Beginner Level

Open the terminal. To complete each step, type in the following commands in the order shown.

Installing and configuring your ROS environment

We recommend ROS-hydro on Ubuntu 12.04, instructions given on this link. The commands are given below. Complete all of these in the same Terminal during the same session.

If not using Ubuntu 12.04 and installing hydro: please refer to instructions given here.

1) Setup sources list:

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

You may be prompted for your super-user password. This should be your username password. Type it into the terminal and press ENTER.

2) Setup keys:

   wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/ros.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -

3) Update Debian package:

   sudo apt-get update

4) Install Desktop-Full:

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

5) Initialize rosdep:

  sudo rosdep init
  rosdep update

6) Setup Enviornment:

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

7) Install rosinstall:

  sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall

Navigating the ROS Filesystem

First, if catkin is not already installed, we need to settle some dependencies and install catkin.

Settle dependencies:

  sudo apt-get install cmake python-catkin-pkg python-empty python-nose python-setuptools libgtest-dev build-essential

Install catkin:

  sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-catkin

Now we can focus on navigation. Here is a list of commands to navigate around the ROS files and folders.

• To find the path of a package: rospack find [package-name]

Example:

  rospack find roscpp

• To change directory: roscd [locationname[/subdir]]

Example:

  roscd roscpp

• To see your working (current) directory:

  pwd

• To see your ROS environment path:

  echo $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH

• To move to the folder ROS stores its logs:

  roscd log

• To see contents of a particular package: rosls [locationname[/subdir]]

Example:

  rosls roscpp_tutorials

• TAB completion is also supported.