ROS - Install ROS and TurtleBot3 packages

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The information contained on this page is not completely correct. Noetic is ROS1 therefore when checking out TurtleBot3, we should use the repository for ROS1.

In this post we will document how we can install ROS Noetic and TurtleBot3 packages on Ubuntu 20.04.

Install ROS Noetic

You may follow the steps in the official documentation and note that ros-noetic-desktop-full is recommended. One good thing about ros installation is we can verify it. After ros is installed, you may follow the steps in Understanding ROS Topics to run a TurgleSim programm.

Install TurtleBot3 packages.

The installation of TurtleBot3 packages can be tricky. There are different ways to install the TurtleBot3 packages and you may find many posts that document the steps online. The official TurttleBot3 documentation is based on Ubuntu 18.04 and ROS Dashing Diademata and it proposes to use the following commands for the installation:

mkdir -p ~/turtlebot3_ws/src
cd ~/turtlebot3_ws
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ROBOTIS-GIT/turtlebot3/ros2/turtlebot3.repos
vcs import src < turtlebot3.repos
colcon build --symlink-install

Note: This instruction seems specific to the ubuntu and ROS version. It also has dependencies on the build tool colcon and the structure of the turtle3 repos.

There is another way to install the TurttleBot3 packages which is documented here:

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/ROBOTIS-GIT/turtlebot3.git
git clone https://github.com/ROBOTIS-GIT/turtlebot3_msgs.git
git clone https://github.com/ROBOTIS-GIT/turtlebot3_simulations.git
git clone https://github.com/ROBOTIS-GIT/turtlebot3_autorace.git
cd ..
rosdep install --from-paths src -i -y
catkin_make
source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash
rospack profile

There are two differences between this approach and the official one:

The build tool is different. In this approach we use catkin_make.
The repos structure is different. If you use the approach mentioned in the TurtleBot3 official document, you may get a different repos structure after you import the turtlebot3.repos.

Here is my repo structure. As of this post is writing, the catkin_make command can be executed with the following repo structure:

./src
├── CMakeLists.txt -> /opt/ros/noetic/share/catkin/cmake/toplevel.cmake
├── turtlebot3
├── turtlebot3_bringup
├── turtlebot3_msgs
├── turtlebot3_navigation
├── turtlebot3_simulations
│   ├── turtlebot3_fake
│   ├── turtlebot3_gazebo
│   └── turtlebot3_simulations
├── turtlebot3_slam
└── turtlebot3_teleop

#### Trouble Shooting One of the difficulties I had when installing the TurtleBot3 packages is the package dependencies. The package dependency is specified in the CMakeLists.txt file in each package. For expample you may find the following code in a CMakeLists.txt file:

find_package(catkin REQUIRED COMPONENTS
  rospy
  geometry_msgs
)

This means the current package depends on rospy and geometry_msgs. Note that these two packages are ros packages. In order to install a specific ros package, you could use the following command:

sudo apt install ros-noetic-<package-name>

To find the missing ros package name, you could use the command below. For exmple if the build failed due to the missing rospy package, we could exectue

apt search ros-noetic | grep -i rospy

The output of the above command will provide a hint on the name of the missing ros pcakge.

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