Before installing ROS on Beaglebone Black, we have to achieve some prerequisites. As this book is focused on ROS, we will list them without entering into detail. There is a lot of information about Beaglebone Black and Ubuntu ARM available on websites, forums, and books that you can check out.

First, we have to install an Ubuntu ARM distribution compatible with ROS. So, an image of Ubuntu ARM is needed. You can obtain an Ubuntu 13.04 Raring armhf using wget with the following command:

$ wget https://rcn-ee.net/deb/flasher/raring/BBB-eMMC-flasher-ubuntu-13.04-2013-10-08.img

Download the Ubuntu 13.04 armhf image and install it on your SD card. You can get more details on how to install Ubuntu on Bealgebone Black on eLinux at http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:Ubuntu_On_BeagleBone_Black#Ubuntu_Raring_On_Micro_SD.

The process described in the preceding webpage works fine, but we have to be careful with the version of Ubuntu used. As the website is periodically updated, they are now using Ubuntu 14.04, which is not compatible with ROS. We will use an Ubuntu 13.04 Raring armhf as mentioned earlier.

Once we have Ubuntu ARM on our platform, the Beaglebone Black network interfaces must be configured to provide access to the network. So, you will have to configure the network settings such as IP, DNS, and gateway.

Remember that the easiest way could be mounting the SD card in another computer and editing /etc/network/interfaces.

After setting up the network, we should install the packages, programs, and libraries that ROS will need such as CMake, Python, or Vim using the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get install cmake python-catkin-pkg python-empy python-nose python-setuptools libgtest-dev build-essential

$ sudo apt-get install g++ curl pkg-config libv4l-dev libjpeg-dev build-essential libssl-dev vim

The operating system for Beaglebone Black is set up for micro SD cards with 1-4 GHz. This memory space is very limited if we want to use a great part of the ROS Hydro packages. So in order to solve this situation, we can use SD cards with larger space and expand the file system to occupy all the space available with re-partitioning.

So if we want to work with a bigger memory space, it is recommended to expand the Beaglebone Black memory file system. This process is further explained at http://elinux.org/Beagleboard:Expanding_File_System_Partition_On_A_microSD.

You can do this by following the commands listed next:

Now we should be ready to install ROS. At this point, the process of installation is pretty similar to the PC installation previously explained in this chapter. So, we should be familiar with it. We will see that the main difference when installing ROS on BeagleBone Black is that we can't install the ROS full-desktop; we must install it package by package.

Now you will start setting up your local machine:

$ sudo update-locale LANG=C LANGUAGE=C LC_ALL=C LC_MESSAGES=POSIX

After this, we will configure the source lists depending on the Ubuntu version that we have installed in BeagleBone Black. The number of Ubuntu versions compatible with BeagleBone Black are limited, and only active builds can be found for Ubuntu 13.04 raring armhf, the most popular version of Ubuntu ARM.

As explained previously, this step is needed to confirm that the origin of the code is correct and that no-one has modified the code or programs without the knowledge of the owner:

$ wget http://packages.namniart.com/repos/namniart.key -O - | sudo apt-key add –

Before the installation of ROS packages, we must update the system to avoid problems of library dependencies.

$ sudo apt-get update

This part of the installation is slightly different for the Beaglebone Black. There are a lot of libraries and packages in ROS and not all of them compile fully on an ARM. So, it is not possible to make a full-desktop installation. It is recommended to install package by package to ensure that they will work on an ARM platform.

You can try to install ROS-base, known as ROS Bare Bones. ROS-base installs the ROS package along with the build and communications libraries but does not include the GUI tools:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-ros-base

We can install specific ROS packages by using the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-PACKAGE

If we need to find the ROS packages available for BeagleBone Black, you can run the following command:

$ apt-cache search ros-hydro

For example, the following packages are the basics that work with ROS and can be installed individually using apt-get install:

$ sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-ros
$ sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-roslaunch
$ sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-rosparam
$ sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-rosservice

Although theoretically, not all the packages of ROS are supported by BeagleBone Black, in practice, we have been able to migrate entire projects developed on PC to BeagleBone Black. We tried a lot of packages, and we could only not install rviz.

The rosdep command-line tool must be installed and initialized before you can use ROS. This allows you to easily install libraries and solving system dependencies for the source you want to compile, and is required to run some core components in ROS. You can use the following commands to install and initialize rosdep:

$ sudo apt-get install python-rosdep
$ sudo rosdep init
$ rosdep update

If you have arrived at this step, congratulations because you have installed ROS in your BeagleBone Black. The ROS environment variables can be added to your bash, so they will be added every time a shell is launched:

$ echo "source /opt/ros/hydro/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
$ source ~/.bashrc

We have to be careful if we have more than one version of ROS in our system. The bashrc setup must use the variables of the version being used only.

If we want to set up the environment in the current shell, we will run the following command:

$ source /opt/ros/hydro/setup.bash

Rosinstall is a common command-line tool in ROS that helps us to install packages easily. It can be installed on Ubuntu with the following command line:

$ sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall