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 Humble Distribution

Our class exercises, assignments, and projects are standardized on the ROS2 Humble Distribution running on Ubuntu 22.04. If you cannot install Ubuntu 22.04 directly on your machine, you will need to use a virtual machine-based installation. The KSU CS department offers students/faculty licenses for VMWare, so that is what we will support in class.

There are a lot of resources for setting up a virtual machine and installing Ubuntu 22.04, so the instruction below assume that you have already done that.

Install ROS2 Humble based on the instructions on the Humble distribution Installation documentation. There is also a video walkthrough by Edouard Renard on YouTube.

Here are some additional notes:

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

  • Under Installing ROS 2 Packages, choose the Desktop Install

sudo apt install ros-humble-desktop

  • Note: in the Renard video above, the Development tools: Compilers and other tools to build ROS packages is not mentioned. You can go ahead and an install those. Or.. you can just install as we need them in the exercises/homework.

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

source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash

to your .bashrc file, so that the ROS2 environment variables, etc. are set up each time you open a new terminal window (Adding this to your .bashrc is suggested in the Renard video).

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