ROS

- ROS rationals

Software projects are subject to the change in the underlying software technology. It happened to me to develop at Linux kernel level in my university days and to see most of the effort lost because of a major change of the kernel itself. In the project Yarp, I would like to avoid as much as possible this inconvenient trying to decouple the low-level details and the logic and trying to avoid reinventing the wheel each time. These rationales brought me to study and use ROS the robot operating system. ROS provides a way to separate code and a logical mean to exchange information, and it does it at a good abstraction level. There is a community working on it and using it, ad it looks a defacto standard in robotics, providing libraries, tools and lots of knowledge made available by the community itself.

The cost of this approach is the learning curve to get needed knowledge, and the benefits are a clean design approach and a simple, documented, scalable, reusable, product.

- ROS installation

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My Ros install for rpi 3 B+

My ideal setup, for the dev-prod environment, would have been, the one with Ubuntu Core on both the RPI and VM, but as the pi3B+ is pretty young, it is not yet convenient to install Ubuntu Core. I will retry later on, once the new images will be updated.

After some tests, the configuration for the production/development ROS environment I chose is:

on the rpi

• a pre built linux/ROS kinetic image: rosberrypi

on the virtual box

• Ubuntu MATE 16.04 64 bit
• Ros Kinetic

on both

• Arduino 1.8.7
• Rosserial

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Other installations

• Ubuntu MATE 16.04 for ARMv7 ( if it works on your pi )

Pre built linux/ROS kinetic images

• rosberrypi

Rasbpian and ROS kinetic

• option 1: introrobotics.com script

• option 2 wiki.ros.org

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