The first step is to install the ROS system on your computer according to the instructions] on the ROS homepage. There are many different versions of ROS. The latest version is currently ROS Melodic Morenia. Long Term Support (LTS) is version [[http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic|ROS Kinetic Kame. Most versions of the packages work on this version, so this version is also used in this tutorial. ROS Kinetic is primarily designed to run on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS operating system. ROS can also be run in a separate Docker container. This allows ROS to run on many different operating systems and simplifies the management and development of robot software.

The development of ROS2 is already underway. You can read more about it here.

To make ROS easier to install on Ubuntu 16.04, an automated installation script has been created, which will run automatically to install all required packages.

To run the installation script, use the following command on the terminal:

 wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/oroca/oroca-ros-pkg/master/ros_install.sh && sudo chmod 755 ./ros_install.sh && ./ros_install.sh catkin_ws kinetic

Create a folder named catkin_ws . If you used an automatic install script, you can skip creating a folder:

 $ mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src #Create folders ~/catkin_ws/src

Compile catkin workspace:

 $ cd ~/catkin_ws/ #Go to folder ~/catkin_ws/
 $ catkin_make #compile the computing environment

command catkin_make is a handy tool for managing catkin workspaces. When you run this command, CMakeLists.txt is created and linked to the src folder. The build and devel folders are also created.

looking at the devel folder, you see that there are some *.sh files (shell script) in the folder:

 $ ls -l devel

When extracting these files (source), the workspace variables are used. After that, packages in the workspace can be launched.

Use the work environment you created earlier:

 $ source devel/setup.bash

To make sure that the setup script worked to check that the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH environment variable contains your workspace:

 $ echo $ROS_PACKAGE_PATH
 /home/youruser/catkin_ws/src:/opt/ros/kinetic/share

Since multiple terminal windows are usually required to use ROS, and it would be tedious to use the workspace every time we add a .baschrc line that automatically takes our workspace when we open a new terminal window:

 echo 'source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash' >> ~/.bashrc

Your ROS environment is now configured and will be deployed automatically. Next, explore the ROS file system.