Contents
No longer supported! Please use the groovy build instructions.
Overview
ROS Fuerte is EOL, and these instructions for getting it to work on Windows are severely outdated. They are only kept here for historical reasons.
Please do not expect these steps to work, or try to follow them.
For future Windows support, see the relevant ROS2 resources.
We now have enough functionality and enough to be useful in some situations. The mingw cross compiles are fairly stable and the msvc is now native thanks to a 100% cmake build environment codenamed catkin. To be practical, we are not targeting the windows environment as a full blown replacement for linux-ros as windows doesn't have the mechanisms to handle the scaling of complexity (e.g. rosdeps), but it needs to be useful in some simple use case scenarios. For example,
- Monitoring/debugging/interfacing with ros robots from a remote windows pc.
- Integrating with programs that only utilise windows drivers/libraries.
- Using ros comms to connect ros robots to a much larger networked environment.
- Computationally heavy algorithms running on an idle pc away from the robot.
Information
Subscribe to the ChangeList page to keep track of progress by email.
Roscon 2012 Presentation - Windows on Ros slides.
Getting Started
WinRos on Windows
This is for native windows development with the microsoft 2010 compiler. Currently supporting either windows sdk 7.1 (cl/nmake) or visual studio 10.0.
Msvc Status - what's working and what's not.
Msvc SDK - installing, configuring and verifying a pre-built sdk.
Msvc SDK Projects - developing projects with visual studio and the sdk.
Msvc SDK Messages - developing new ros msg types with the sdk.
Msvc Runtime Environment - rosmaster, roslaunch'ers, rosparam and ros logging with the sdk.
For more advanced usage:
Msvc Build Environment - compiling the sdk/building your packages catkin style!
Porting Stacks - how to hack an existing catkin stack for winros.
Msvc Packages - how to create msvc packages and stacks, ros style.
Msvc Debugging - debugging msvc with win_ros.
WinRos on Linux
This is for the control roboticists who love working in linux and get flustered when asked to build windows apps for the rest of the world (namely users/test engineers) there is the mingw cross-compiler. There is also qt support here - write the code once and compile your qt app for both windows and linux without any changes.
Mingw Build Environment - setting up the mingw-cross build environment.
Mingw Packages - how to create mingw packages and stacks, ros style.
Mingw Qt-Ros Packages - how to create mingw qt packages in ros.
Where To Go From Here
Developing - if you're interested in helping, either with the infrastructure or porting stacks, start here.