ROS

This article or section is out of date.
Reason:
Important packages have been dropped from the AUR + Implies python2 compatibility. Instructions need to be checked if any of the flags have changed (Discuss in
Talk:ROS
)
ROS
is an open-source, meta-operating system for your robot. It provides the services you would expect from an operating system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management.
ROS 1
Installation
You can
install
ros-noetic-desktop-full
AUR
[
broken link
: package not found]
. It is also available through an unofficial user repository:
Unofficial user repositories#arch4edu
.
catkin_make in Melodic
As specified by the
ROS wiki
, the first catkin_make command in a clean workspace should be:
$ catkin_make -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3 -DBOOST_ROOT=/opt/boost1.69 -DBoost_NO_SYSTEM_PATHS=TRUE
Subsequent builds should be done with just
$ catkin_make
Using Catkin/ROS with an IDE
CLion
To make
CLion
AUR
support ROS packages, you can change the
Exec
parameter of its desktop file as follows.
~/.local/share/applications/jetbrains-clion.desktop
Exec=bash -i -c "source /home/
user
/catkin_ws/devel/setup.sh;/opt/clion/bin/clion.sh" %f
However,
/home/
user
/catkin_ws
must be exchanged with your Catkin workspace. You can now open a Catkin project without
cmake
complaining about missing packages, hopefully.
If desired or needed you can use Python 3 by adding
-DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3
to the CMake options which can be found in the settings.
catkin build in Melodic
For configuring the systems using the
catkin build
environment, one have to configure the catkin workspace as usual and run:
$ catkin config -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3 -DBOOST_ROOT=/opt/boost1.69 -DBoost_NO_SYSTEM_PATHS=TRUE
Afterwards, use
catkin build
as normal. Please remember to reconfigure your catkin whenever you delete the configuration files (i.e. the
catkin_ws
directory)
Rebuild when shared libraries are updated
When you update a library that ROS depends on (e.g. Boost), all packages that link to it must be rebuilt. Most AUR helpers will not detect this situation. The following script will generate a list of all packages that are linked to missing so files:
https://seangreenslade.com/h/snippets/ros-find-outofdate.py
(Note that the script requires
pyalpm
to be installed.)
ROS 2
Installation
Building using AUR
ros2-kilted
AUR
package aims to provide an easy way to install ROS 2 on Arch Linux. After installing the package, you need to configure your environment (i.e.
source
) in order to use ROS 2 — See
#Usage Examples
.
Distrobox
Distrobox allows to use any Linux distribution inside your terminal
[1]
, including Ubuntu, which in turn allows to run ROS2 natively.
Distrobox
is available in the official repository as
distrobox
, and relies on
Docker
or
Podman
containers.
Once Ubuntu is up and running, install ROS by reading the
official installation guide
.
Running on Wayland
Although ROS2 packages run fine on Wayland, graphical applications such as
gazebo
or
rviz2
do not. To make them work, set the
environment variable
QT_QPA_PLATFORM
to
xcb
. You can later test the result with:
$ rviz2
Usage examples
First source the workspace, or change the directory to where you installed as before.
If you are using zsh, change
source /opt/ros2/foxy/setup.bash
to
source /opt/ros2/foxy/setup.zsh
$ source /opt/ros2/foxy/setup.bash
A tip to source workspace is adding a function like this your
shell startup file
:
ros2_on(){
     export ROS_DOMAIN_ID=42
     export ROS_VERSION=2
     export ROS_PYTHON_VERSION=3
     export ROS_DISTRO=foxy
     source /opt/ros2/foxy/setup.bash
}
Remember to make any applicable changes, namely changing the ROS_DISTRO variable to the distrobution you have installed.
You can change ROS_DOMAIN_ID to your favourite number, or the number you are actually using.
Functionality comparable to
roscore
,
rosnode
,
rostopic
,
rosmsg
,
rospack
,
rosrun
and
rosservice
is available via
ros2
:
$ ros2 -h
usage: ros2 [-h] Call `ros2 <command> -h` for more detailed usage. ... 

ros2 is an extensible command-line tool for ROS 2.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

Commands:
  daemon    Various daemon related sub-commands
  msg       Various msg related sub-commands
  node      Various node related sub-commands
  pkg       Various package related sub-commands
  run       Run a package specific executable
  security  Various security related sub-commands
  service   Various service related sub-commands
  srv       Various srv related sub-commands
  topic     Various topic related sub-commands

  Call `ros2 <command> -h` for more detailed usage.
A typical "Hello World" example starts with running a publisher node:
$ ros2 topic pub /chatter 'std_msgs/String' "data: 'Hello World'"
Then, in another terminal, you can run a subscriber (Do not forget to source the workspace in every new terminal):
$ ros2 topic echo /chatter
List existing nodes:
$ ros2 node list
publisher_std_msgs_String
List topics:
$ ros2 topic list
/chatter
ROS 2's version of rviz is
$ rviz2