ROS Indigo Igloo will be primarily targeted at the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty) release, though other Linux systems as well as Mac OS X, Android, and Windows are supported to varying degrees. For more information on compatibility on other platforms, please see REP 3: Target Platforms.

Indigo supports releasing, documenting and integration testing of catkin-based packages only. This is especially driven by the goal to provide long term support of this distribution. Building rosbuild-based packages from source is still supported though.

1. Installation

1.1 Set your Locale

Boost and some of the ROS tools require that the system locale be set. You can set it with:

sudo update-locale LANG=C LANGUAGE=C LC_ALL=C LC_MESSAGES=POSIX

1.2 Setup the sources.list

Setup your computer to accept software from the ARM mirror on packages.ros.org.

Due to limited resources, there are only active builds for Trusty armhf (14.04), since this is the stable, long-term Ubuntu release and is the most-requested distribution in conjunction with ROS Indigo.

Ubuntu 14.04 (Trusty armhf)

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

1.3 Set up your keys

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

1.4 Installation

First, make sure your Debian package index is up-to-date:

sudo apt-get update

There are many different libraries and tools in ROS – not all compile fully on ARM. You can also install ROS packages individually.

ROS-Base: (Bare Bones) ROS package, build, and communication libraries. No GUI tools.

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-ros-base

1.4.1Add Individual Packages

You can install a specific ROS package (replace underscores with dashes of the package name):

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-PACKAGE

e.g.

sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-navigation

To find available packages, use:

apt-cache search ros-indigo

The Ubuntu ARM package status is available here.

1.5 Initialize rosdep

Before you can use ROS, you will need to install and initialize rosdep. rosdep enables you to easily install system dependencies for source you want to compile and is required to run some core components in ROS.

sudo apt-get install python-rosdep
sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

1.6 Environment setup

It’s convenient if the ROS environment variables are automatically added to your bash session every time a new shell is launched:

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

If you just want to change the environment of your current shell, you can type:

source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash

1.7 Getting rosinstall

rosinstall is a frequently used command-line tool in ROS that is distributed separately. It enables you to easily download many source trees for ROS packages with one command.

To install this tool on Ubuntu, run:

sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall

1.8 Build farm status

The packages that you installed were built by ROS build farm. You can check the status of individual packages here.

2. Run

Now the installation of ROS is finished. You can run roscore on the terminal, and then ROS master will  output information like that:

linaro@linaro-alip:~$ roscore

… logging to /home/linaro/.ros/log/6fe7a434-1dea-11b2-8e0e-1000a4f31ddf/roslaunch-linaro-alip-1217.log
Checking log directory for disk usage. This may take awhile.
Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
Done checking log file disk usage. Usage is <1GB.

started roslaunch server http://linaro-alip:36980/
ros_comm version 1.11.13

SUMMARY
========

PARAMETERS
* /rosdistro: indigo
* /rosversion: 1.11.13

NODES

auto-starting new master
process[master]: started with pid [1228]
ROS_MASTER_URI=http://linaro-alip:11311/

setting /run_id to 6fe7a434-1dea-11b2-8e0e-1000a4f31ddf
process[rosout-1]: started with pid [1241]
started core service [/rosout]

That’s the installation tutorial of ROS on pcDuino8 Uno.