The Robot Operating System is a large collection of libraries that can be used with your robots. It is relativeley new, having only released version 1.1.4 recently. The whole ROS is Open Source, making it great for collaboration on various robots around the globe. For some reason or another, there is an elaborate method in order to get ROS installed and operational on your machine.
One of the projects this semester was to see how to make the Turtlesim example on ROS work on the Ubuntu machine at my workstation in COSI.
We successfully got it working under a clean build of Ubuntu 9.04. It also helped to understand that you have to start the roscore before you run any of the examples.
Summary of Project
Goals Achieved:
- Installed ROS on Ubuntu machine
- Learned that roscore has to be executed prior to atempting to run any example programs in ROS
- Successfully ran the turtlesim example!
Future Goals:
- Test out more complicated examples in ROS (eg: PR2 Simulator)
- Develop some code for ROS for use with Arduinos
- Figure out how to get ROS working on other operating systems (Mac OS and Windows)
- Create an interface between ROS and Tuxdroid