Getting started with ROS

This manual describes ROS installation process, as well as basic usage patterns. All materials are taken from the official ROS Wiki. The guide describes installation of ROS Indigo on Ubuntu 14.04. We are not using the latest version of Ubuntu and ROS as they are not well supported (yet) and many packages we will require have not been ported to the later versions of ROS. You still may try the latest distributions of Ubuntu/ROS and try to build missing packages manually. Keep in mind, that a certain distribution of ROS will work only with a limited set of Ubuntu versions. If you need to install a different combination of ROS/Ubuntu please refer to the ROS Wiki.

Installation 

Configure your Ubuntu repositories to allow "restricted," "universe," and "multiverse." You can follow the Ubuntu guide for instructions on doing this. Open Ubuntu terminal (Ctrl-Alt-t or Unity Dash) and input the following sequence of commands ( complete manual):

  1. sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
  2. sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-key 421C365BD9FF1F717815A3895523BAEEB01FA116
  3. sudo apt-get update
  4. sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-desktop-full # This step might take some time
  5. sudo rosdep init
  6. rosdep update
  7. echo "source /opt/ros/indigo/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
  8. source ~/.bashrc
  9. sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall

Now, to test your installation, please proceed to the ROS Tutorials.