melodic noetic   Show EOL distros: 

Setting Up a System to Run ARIAC 2017

This tutorial will walk you through the setup required to make a computer ready to run ARIAC.

Installing Gazebo7

ARIAC 2017 requires Gazebo7 to be installed, with version 7.5.0 or higher. Instructions for installing Gazebo can be found here:

http://gazebosim.org/tutorials?tut=install_ubuntu&cat=install#Alternativeinstallation:step-by-step

The "alternative installation" steps in the above link will be summarized here. You could use the "one-liner" installation, but it would not guarantee that you get Gazebo7.

Setup Ubuntu to Install Packages from the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF)

First you need to add OSRF's package repository to your system so it can install packages from there. Do so by running this command:

• sudo sh -c '
    echo "deb http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo/ubuntu-stable `lsb_release -cs` main" \
      > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gazebo-stable.list'

Next you need to add the signing key to your computer so the packages can be verified:

• wget http://packages.osrfoundation.org/gazebo.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -

Installing Gazebo

First update the apt-get database since you added the OSRF packages repository to the sources list:

• sudo apt-get update

Finally, install gazebo7:

• sudo apt-get install gazebo7 gazebo7-plugin-base gazebo7-common libgazebo7

Installing ROS

Next you need to install ROS, which ARIAC uses to provide the competition interface. Instructions to do this can be found here:

These instructions will be summarized next.

Setup Ubuntu to Install Packages from ROS

First add the ROS packages repository to apt-get's list of sources:

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

Then add the key ROS uses to sign the packages:

• sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net --recv-key 0xB01FA116

Installing ROS Desktop

ROS has a few "variants" which contain commonly used components, e.g. "Robot" is a small set of things that you'd run on a deployed robot, "Desktop" is a superset of "Robot" that also contains tools you might use on a workstation, and "Desktop-Full" additionally has perception algorithms and simulators.

First update apt-get's database since you added the ROS repositories to the list of sources:

• sudo apt-get update

Then install the "Desktop" packages ROS $ROS_DISTRO:

• sudo apt-get install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-desktop

To finish the ROS $ROS_DISTRO installation, initialize the rosdep database:

• sudo rosdep init; rosdep update

Installing Gazebo-ROS Compatibility Packages

Installing Additional Dependencies

Install the following package which is needed to run the ARIAC examples:

• sudo apt-get install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-ros-controllers

Installing the ARIAC 2017 packages from Binaries

You can either install the ARIAC packages from binaries (recommended) or by building the software locally on your machine.

To finish your install, source the ROS setup.bash file:

• source /opt/ros/$ROS_DISTRO/setup.bash

This sets up your shell to run the ROS commands needed to run ARIAC. There is also a setup.zsh if you are using that shell.

So that the above line will be automatically run when you open new terminal windows, put it in your bashrc:

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

Alternative: Building the ARIAC packages from Source

This strategy is only recommended for a few cases:

• You want to test a change you're going to propose to the ARIAC source code.
• There are no ARIAC binaries available for your system.

Setting Up a Catkin Workspace

Since the ARIAC packages are catkin packages, we'll start by setting up a catkin workspace. First create a folder for the workspace, something like this:

• mkdir -p ~/ariac_ws/src

The src folder will contain the source code you want to build.

Getting the Source Code

Next you will need to get the ARIAC source code. You can either "clone" the source using git or you can extract an archive of the source that you downloaded from BitBucket. To clone the source:

• cd ~/ariac_ws/src
  git clone https://bitbucket.org/osrf/ariac -b ariac_2017

If you would prefer to download the source as an archive:

• cd ~/ariac_ws/src
  wget https://bitbucket.org/osrf/ariac/get/ariac_2017.zip
  unzip ariac_2017.zip
  rm ariac_2017.zip

Building the ARIAC Packages

Before starting the build, you need to source the ROS setup.bash file:

• source /opt/ros/$ROS_DISTRO/setup.bash

This sets up your shell to build on top of ROS. There is also a setup.zsh if you are using that shell.

Next start the build using the catkin build tool called catkin_make:

• cd ~/ariac_ws
  catkin_make install

This will build the ARIAC packages and install them to a local folder, in this case ~/ariac_ws/install next to the src folder.

This folder will also have a setup.bash file in it that you can source before building your own competition packages:

• source ~/ariac_ws/install/setup.bash

Note that sourcing the setup.bash file in the devel space does not work, see this issue for updates.

So that the above line will be automatically run when you open new terminal windows, put it in your bashrc:

• echo "source ~/ariac_ws/install/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

Using ARIAC

See the ARIAC interface tutorial for how to run ARIAC.