Ubuntu 20.04 installation

This guide will explain the steps needed to install the Niryo Robot Stack on an Ubuntu 20.04 computer. You can apply these steps to set up a working simulation environment on any development computer, or to set up a working robot stack on a Raspberry Pi.

Note

All terminal command listed are for Ubuntu users.

Installation index:

Prerequisites

The Niryo ROS Stack runs on top of ROS Noetic. This version of ROS is strongly dependent of Ubuntu 20.04 version, thus, this OS is currently the only official supported OS.

Be sure to have an up to date system before continuing:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Install ROS

You need to install ROS Noetic. To do so, follow the ROS official tutorial here and chose the Desktop-Full Install.

Set up your workspace

The Ned ROS Stack is a set of ROS packages that need to be compiled in a catkin workspace. Place yourself in the folder of your choice and create a folder catkin_ws_niryo as well as a sub-folder src:

mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws_niryo/src

Then go to the src/ folder then clone the robot repository and init its submodules.

cd ~/catkin_ws_niryo/src/
git clone https://github.com/NiryoRobotics/ned_ros.git
cd ned_ros
git submodule update --init ros-foxglove-bridge

Install dependencies

To ensure the functioning of all Ned’s packages, you need to install several more packages:

  • build-essential

  • sqlite3

  • ffmpeg

sudo apt install sqlite3 ffmpeg build-essential -y

Note

These packages are mostly useful on a real robot, but as the code is identical between simulation and real functioning, a lack of these packages on a simulation can lead to unstabilities.

For each Ned ROS package, we have referenced all the dependencies in their respective package.xml file, which allows to install each dependency via rosdep command. We also provide a requirements.txt file which lists all the required dependencies for python code which can be installed via pip.

pip install -r ~/catkin_ws_niryo/src/ned_ros/requirements.txt
rosdep update
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -r -y

Build the packages

Go to the root of your workspace and perform the build of all packages:

cd ~/catkin_ws_niryo
catkin_make install

If no errors occurred during the build phase, the setup of your environment is almost complete!

Then, in order to run the built ROS nodes, it is necessary to source the configuration file to add them to the environment. To do so, run the command:

source ~/catkin_ws_niryo/install/setup.bash

It is necessary to run this command each time you launch a new terminal. If you want to make this sourcing happen automatically for all terminals, you can add it to your .bashrc file:

echo "source ~/catkin_ws_niryo/install/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Installation is now finished!