Introduction

The following guide will show you how to install ROS Kinetic LTS (Long-Term Support) and other necessary packages for the Raspberry Pi on the Pheeno. The installation for ROS Indigo was a bit different because it used Raspbian OS as the base. Since the, I have seen the light and way that is Ubuntu MATE. I strongly recommend that users who want to use ROS Kinetic to use Ubuntu MATE as the Pheeno’s Raspberry Pi OS. The old installation instructions will still be available, but this will be considered our default installation instructions for the Pheeno.

NOTE: The latter part of this guide are required package installations needed for our pheeno_ros ROS package ONLY ON THE RASPBIAN INSTALLATION.

Installing ROS Kinetic on Ubuntu Mate

The official ROS guide here provides the details for installation on any Ubuntu system. That is how easy it is if you use Ubuntu Mate! One suggestion we would like to make is that you only install the ROS-Base (ros-kinetic-ros-base) and NOT the Desktop-Full Install (ros-kinetic-desktop-full or ros-kinetic-desktop). The Raspberry Pi is not powerful enough to run many of the GUI tools provided in the desktop installations (and it is a waste of space).

Another easier way to install ROS Kinetic on Ubuntu Mate, and my suggested way, is to use a really nice script created by the wonderful engineers at ROBOTIS. They have created a script that does the whole ROS installation procedure and setup, which can be found here (Their guide for the TurtleBot3 is very well done too.). To use it, do the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ROBOTIS-GIT/robotis_tools/master/install_ros_kinetic_rp3.sh && \
  chmod 755 ./install_ros_kinetic_rp3.sh && \
  bash ./install_ros_kinetic_rp3.sh

and thats it! ROS Kinetic is installed and setup automatically!

NOTE:Once you are done installing ROS Kinetic, skip to the Installing Other Necessary Packages section.

Installing ROS Kinetic on Raspbian Jessie

This information used to derive is from the official documentation located here. If you would like some more information than what is provided in this guide, we ask that you refer to the official documentation.

Setup ROS Repositories

First, we would like to pull packages from the official ROS repository, so we must add ROS to our list of Debian repositories.

$ sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

$ sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-key 421C365BD9FF1F717815A3895523BAEEB01FA116

From now on, updating and upgrading commands will result in listings and updates for ROS packages. We will do an initial update of the system with the newly added ROS source.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get upgrade

Install Bootstrap Dependencies

ROS requires some necessary Python packages. The first command will download Python specific packages that are good for development. As an aside, the Python packages we will be downloading are fantastic and should be learned irrespective of using ROS. Once those packages are installed, we will use pip, a Python package manager, to install ROS specific Python packages.

$ sudo apt-get install -y python-rosdep python-rosinstall-generator python-wstool python-rosinstall build-essential cmake

Initialize rosdep

One of the previous packages installed called rosdep is a ROS package installer capable of fulfilling dependencies for many packages. Once installed from pip, we need to initialize it as such.

$ sudo rosdep init
$ rosdep update

Create a catkin Workspace

To begin the ROS installation, we need to create a workspace to build everything. In the main directory, we will create ros_catkin_ws to begin building ROS onto the Raspberry Pi.

$ mkdir -p ~/ros_catkin_ws
$ cd ~/ros_catkin_ws

To begin building, we will create a ROS installation file containing all the files and dependencies needed. The Raspberry Pi is underpowered and won’t really run the full desktop suite effectively. Therefore, we will just install the ros_comm package, which contains ROS, build, and basic communication libraries. wstool, a command line tool for maintaining workspaces, will then initialize a workspace around our rosinstall file.

$ rosinstall_generator ros_comm --rosdistro kinetic --deps --wet-only --tar > kinetic-ros_comm-wet.rosinstall
$ wstool init src kinetic-ros_comm-wet.rosinstall

Installing Unavailable Dependencies

Since not all dependencies are available in the Debian (jessie) repos, we need to build some from source using dpkg. Unlike the ROS Indigo installation, collada_urdf is the only Unavailable dependency ROS Kinetic needs (but it seems that a source install is required due to runtime failure from the maintained Debian package).

$ mkdir -p ~/ros_catkin_ws/external_src
$ cd ~/ros_catkin_ws/external_src
$ wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/assimp/files/assimp-3.1/assimp-3.1.1_no_test_models.zip/download -O assimp-3.1.1_no_test_models.zip
$ unzip assimp-3.1.1_no_test_models.zip
$ cd assimp-3.1.1
$ cmake .
$ make -j2
$ sudo make install -j2

Resolving Dependencies with rosdep

The remaining dependencies can just be installed with rosdep as such:

$ cd ~/ros_catkin_ws
$ rosdep install -y --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro kinetic -r --os=debian:jessie

Building the catkin Workspace

Once all our dependencies are resolved, we can finally install ROS on our Pi as shown below. I do want users of this guide to note the use of -j2 at the end of future code snippits. This flag tells the compiler to use two cores instead of the default four. From my experience, not putting this flag resulted in the Pi overheating and the OS freezing. Therefore, our guide will continue using the flag at the end of installation directions to prevent future crashes.

$ sudo ./src/catkin/bin/catkin_make_isolated --install -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release --install-space /opt/ros/kinetic -j2

After the installation completes, we can source the installation as such:

$ source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash

But to make it permanent, you should use this!

$ echo "source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

Congratulations! ROS Kinetic is now installed on your Pi!

Next, we need to install some other packages for the pheeno_ros package to work. Directions to do so are found here.