PR2 is the mobile manipulation robot developed by Willow Garage, the developers of ROS. The robot is equipped with two arms and a head with stereo cameras for long and short distances, as well as a tilting laser.
We can install R2 using a Debian binary directly with the following command:
sudo apt-get install ros-fuerte-nasa-r2-simulator
Alternatively, we can install from sources by following these instructions.
To use the PR2 simulator, which uses Gazebo and the URDF model of the PR2 robot, just run the following:
sudo apt-get install ros-groovy-pr2-simulator
This will install several stacks and packages that allow you to move the robot and control its arms. This functionality is required by some demos not included in this book, for example, one that shows how to open doors with the PR2 robot.
Note that for the PR2 we also require ROS Groovy, although you can try other distributions. Even more important is to use a new version of...