Multiple tools are required to develop new features on our platform. These tools should be installed by any new member that wishes to contribute to our code. This includes installing a new OS on your computer and multiple development tools.
For our current software platform a machine using Ubuntu 18.04 is required for any development that uses ROS. You can learn how to create a bootable installation USB stick here.
ROS (Robot Operating System) is the robotics framework we use for our platform. Its installation is required to start working on our robots. You can find the official installation guide here.
At the moment ROS Melodic is the version we use, but this will all change once Docker is implemented later this year. Ubuntu and ROS installations will also no longer be required.
Git is the version control software we use along with our Github. You can follow this quick installation guide to install it How to install Git on Linux.
You can use any IDE you want, but the vast majority of our members use VSCode since it has a lot of useful extensions that help our workflow. We recommend installing the following extensions on VSCode:
You will need a workspace where you can write new ROS features. You can use multiple workspaces if you want, but reusing the same workspace for different projects will allow you to avoid re-sourcing everytime.
In this example we will create a workspace in ~/Documents, but you can create your workspace anywhere you want.
Navigate to ~/Documents
cd ~/Documents
Create a workspace folder. (You can choose any name you want)
mkdir catkin_ws
cd catkin_ws
mkdir src
Initialize your workspace
catkin_make
Setting up your .bashrc allows you to avoid sourcing your workspace everytime you open a new terminal.
Run the following commands to configure your .bashrc
gedit ~/.bashrc
Add the following line at the end of the file below source /opt/ros/melodic/setup.bash
If you're using Zsh you will need to replace setup.bash with setup.zsh
source ~/Documents/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash
Your ROS environment is now setup! You can now look at our Workflow page to see how to start working on a project!
In case you encouter missing include files, the following dependencies are required:
To install the PointCloud library, execute the following command in youteminal wiht administrative privileges:
$ sudo apt install libpcl-dev ros-melodic-pcl-conversions
For more information, please refer to the official PointCloud website:
https://pointclouds.org/
For installation of the tf libarary, use the following command:
$ sudo apt install ros-melodic-tf2
For additional information and update, please visit the official geometry repository on Github: ros/geometry
To use the Kinova-ROS package, we need to clone the repository and configure the compiler to inlude its files.
# Clone the Kinova-ROS repository to any location on your machine. I recommand /opt/kinova-ros
git clone -b melodic-devel https://github.com/Kinovarobotics/kinova-ros
For detailed instructions and additional information, please visit the official Kinova-ROS repository:
https://github.com/Kinovarobotics/kinova-ros