This course will use the following tools, which students should have installed on laptops that can be brought to class for in-class exercises.

ROS2 Jazzy Distribution

Our class exercises, assignments, and projects are standardized on the ROS2 Jazzy Distribution running on Ubuntu 24.04. If you cannot install Ubuntu 24.04 directly on your machine, you will need to use a virtual machine-based installation. There is a personal use version of VMWare and we typically use that in our research lab, so that is what we will support in class.

Note: in previous years of the course, we used the ROS Humble distribution running on Ubuntu 22.04. If you happen to see mentions of humble or 22.04 in the course material, just please replace that with jazzy and 24.04. For most of the base ROS2 libraries, Jazzy usage is identical to Humble usage. For Gazebo and ROS2 control, there are some differences between the two.

There are a lot of resources for setting up a virtual machine and installing Ubuntu 24.04, so the instruction below assume that you have already done that.

Install ROS2 Jazzy via debian packages based on the instructions on the Jazzy distribution Installation documentation. For a detailed walkthrough of installation, it’s best to consult our textbook – Chapter 2, Section “Installing ROS 2 on Ubuntu”.

Here are some additional notes:

  • Installing the development tools under Install development tools (optional) is listed as optional, but they are REQUIRED for our course work, so please install them.

  • Under Installing ROS 2, choose the Desktop Install

sudo apt install ros-jazzy-desktop

  • Follow the installation instructions through the Try some examples (Talker-listener) — this will ensure that your installation is “working”

  • When doing the Environment setup steps, you should also add

source /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash

to your .bashrc file, so that the ROS2 environment variables, etc. are set up each time you open a new terminal window.

Terminator Terminal Application

Terminator is a terminal application that is convenient for us because it enables easily tiling of multiple terminal windows.

VSCode

Install VSCode on your machine. Install the Microsoft VSCode extension for ROS as described in this video.