ROS Setup and Installation

Installation

ROS Kinetic ONLY supports Wily (Ubuntu 15.10), Xenial (Ubuntu 16.04) and Jessie (Debian 8) for debian packages.

Configure your Ubuntu repositories

Configure your Ubuntu repositories to allow "restricted," "universe," and "multiverse." You can follow the Ubuntu guide for instructions on doing this.

Setup your sources.list

Setup your computer to accept software from packages.ros.org.

• sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

Mirrors

Source Debs are also available

Set up your keys

• sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-key 421C365BD9FF1F717815A3895523BAEEB01FA116

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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. We provided four default configurations to get you started. You can also install ROS packages individually.

In case of problems with the next step, you can use following repositories instead of the ones mentioned above ros-shadow-fixed

• 
  
• Desktop-Full Install: (Recommended) : ROS, rqt, rviz, robot-generic libraries, 2D/3D simulators, navigation and 2D/3D perception

  • sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-desktop-full

To find available packages, use:

apt-cache search ros-kinetic

Initialize rosdep

Before you can use ROS, you will need to 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 rosdep init
rosdep update

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/kinetic/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

If you have more than one ROS distribution installed, ~/.bashrc must only source the setup.bash for the version you are currently using.

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

source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash

If you use zsh instead of bash you need to run the following commands to set up your shell:

echo "source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.zsh" >> ~/.zshrc
source ~/.zshrc

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