Installation

Table of Contents

• Installation
  • Table of Contents
  • ROS Installation and Workspace Setup
    • Installing ROS Melodic
      • A note on catkin
    • Create the workspaces
      • Cartographer workspace
      • Propbot workspace
    • Build an Optimized Google Cartographer for ROS
      • Run the custom Cartographer setup script
      • Build the Cartographer workspace
    • Setup the Propbot Workspace
      • Make Propbot an extension of Cartographer
      • Install dependencies
        • A note on rosdep
      • Build the mapviz plugins
      • Build the workspace

Table of contents generated with markdown-toc

---

ROS Installation and Workspace Setup

The following goes over how to install ROS and setup the catkin workspaces

Installing ROS Melodic

Follow the instructions here to install the melodic version of ROS: http://wiki.ros.org/melodic/Installation/Ubuntu

Ensure that you install the Desktop-Full Install version.

A note on catkin

Documentation: http://wiki.ros.org/catkin

catkin is the build system used for ROS. ROS comes with catkin. After doing the installation of ROS, run the following command:

catkin --version

You should see an output similar to this:

If you do not, there may have been an issue installing catkin. To resolve this, run the following command and try the version check command again:

sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-catkin python-catkin-tools

Create the workspaces

Third Party Packges workspace

In your home directory, make a workspace directory for the third party dependencies needed for Propbot

cd ~/
mkdir propbot_3pp_ws

Propbot workspace

In your home directory, make the propbot workspace directory

cd ~/
mkdir propbot_ws

Then, make the src directory and clone the Propbot repo into the new src directory.

cd ~/propbot_ws
mkdir src
cd src
git clone https://github.com/hannahvsawiuk/PropBot.git

Build an Optimized Google Cartographer for ROS

Now that ROS has been installed, we need to start by building Google Cartographer for our application. Cartographer is a system that provides real-time simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in 2D and 3D across multiple platforms and sensor configurations.

Cartographer documentation:

• General information: https://google-cartographer.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
• Integration with ROS: https://google-cartographer-ros.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Run the custom Cartographer setup script

The script to setup the custom version of Cartographer is in vehicle_autonomy/scripts. To run the setup for the propbot_3pp_ws, run the following command:

~/propbot_ws/src/PropBot/vehicle_autonomy/scripts/setup_third_party.sh propbot_3pp_ws

If everything runs smoothly, you should see the following when the process finishes

Build the Cartographer workspace

Run the following to initialize and build the workspace

cd ~/cartographer_ws
catkin build

This will take some time (up to 30 minutes), so please be patient. If the build succeeds, you should see the following statements:

Setup the Propbot Workspace

Now that the custom Cartographer version has been built, it will be extended with the Propbot packages.

Make Propbot an extension of Cartographer

To initialize the workspace and indicate that propbot_ws will be an extension of cartographer_ws, run the following commands

cd ~/propbot_ws
catkin init
catkin config --extend ../propbot_3pp_ws/devel

The --extend argument explicitly sets the workspace you want to extend. In this case, we want the packages in propbot to extend the custom cartographer setup.

For more information on catkin config, see here: https://catkin-tools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/verbs/catkin_config.html

Install dependencies

To ensure that everything runs smoothly, the dependencies specified by the Propbot packages need to be installed. To accomplish this, run the following:

Ubuntu

cd ~/propbot_ws
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src

Alternative Distros If you are not using Ubuntu, the --os argument is needed, e.g. --os=ubuntu:bionic:

cd ~/propbot_ws
rosdep install --os=<distro info> --from-paths src --ignore-src

A note on rosdep

rosdep is a dependency manager for ROS that helps you install external dependencies in an OS-independent manner.

rosdep documentation:

• Wiki: http://wiki.ros.org/rosdep
• Command reference: https://docs.ros.org/independent/api/rosdep/html/commands.html

Build the mapviz plugins

Prior to building the entire propbot_ws, the mapviz plugs need to be built. Run the following

catkin build mapviz_plugins

If successful, you should see the following

Build the workspace

Finally, build the entire propbot_ws:

cd ~/propbot_ws
catkin build

Ensure that all packages have been successfully built. You should see the following if the build was completed

Now your propbot_ws directory should have the following structure

├── build/          # Build space
├── devel/          # Devel space
├── logs/           # Logs space
└── src/            # Source space
    └── Propbot/    # Propbot packages

For more information on catkin workspace mechanics, see here: https://catkin-tools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/mechanics.html