Ubuntu 18 Installation

This guide will explain the steps needed to install the Niryo Robot Stack on an Ubuntu 18 OS. You can apply these steps to set up a working simulation environment on any development computer, or to set up a working robot stack on a Raspberry Pi.

Installation index:

Prerequisites

The Niryo ROS Stack runs on top of ROS Melodic or Kinetic (deprecated). This version of ROS is strongly dependent of Ubuntu 18.04 version, thus, this OS is currently the only official supported OS.

Be sure to have an up to date system before continuing

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Ubuntu packages

The Niryo ROS Stack needs the following packages in order to run correctly:

  • build-essential
  • sqlite3
  • ffmpeg

Note

These packages are mostly useful on a real robot, but as the code is identical between simulation and real functioning, a lack of these packages on a simulation can lead to unstabilities.

Python environment

The Python environment is installed using the requirements_ned2.txt file

pip2 install -r src/requirements_ned2.txt

Note

ROS Melodic is still using Python2 internally so are our Python scripts to keep version alignment. You thus need to install the requirements using Python2 pip2 tool

ROS set up

Note

All terminal command listed are for Ubuntu users.

Place yourself in the folder of your choice and create a folder catkin_ws_niryo_ned as well as a sub-folder src:

mkdir -p catkin_ws_niryo_ned/src

Then go to the folder catkin_ws_niryo_ned and clone Ned repository in the folder src. For the future operations, be sure to stay in the catkin_ws_niryo_ned folder:

cd catkin_ws_niryo_ned
git clone https://github.com/NiryoRobotics/ned_ros src

Install ROS dependencies

Install ROS

You need to install ROS Melodic. To do so, follow the ROS official tutorial here and chose the Desktop-Full Install.

Install additional packages

To ensure the functioning of all Ned’s packages, you need to install several more packages:

Method 1: Quick installation via ROSDep

For each package, we have referenced all the dependencies in their respective package.xml file, which allows to install each dependency via rosdep command:

rosdep update
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --default-yes --rosdistro melodic --skip-keys "python-rpi.gpio"

Method 2: Full installation

ROS packages needed are:

  • catkin
  • python-catkin-pkg
  • python-pymodbus
  • python-rosdistro
  • python-rospkg
  • python-rosdep-modules
  • python-rosinstall python-rosinstall-generator
  • python-wstool

To install a package on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install <package_name>

Melodic specific packages needed are:

  • moveit
  • control
  • controllers
  • tf2-web-republisher
  • rosbridge-server
  • joint-state-publisher-gui

To install a ROS Melodic’s package on Ubuntu:

sudo apt install ros-melodic-<package_name>

Setup Ned ROS environment

Note

Be sure to be still placed in the catkin_ws_niryo_ned folder.

Then perform the make of Ned’s ROS Stack via the command:

catkin_make

If no errors occurred during the make phase, the setup of your environment is almost complete!

It is necessary to source the configuration file to add all Ned packages to ROS environment. To do so, run the command:

source devel/setup.bash

It is necessary to run this command each time you launch a new terminal. If you want to make this sourcing appends for all your future terminals, you can add it to your bashrc file:

echo "source $(pwd)/devel/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Installation is now finished!