containerized ros

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a set of software libraries and tools for building robot applications.

OS Requirement §

1. OS: Linux
2. Distro: Ubuntu/RHEL
3. Shell: Bash

Installation Procedure: §

My OS Specification §

1. OS: Linux
2. Distro: Fedora 38
3. Shell: Bash

Used Tools §

Packages used to run ROS2 on distributions other than the supported ones.

Distrobox
Podman
Ubuntu 22.04 Container

Installation Procedure §

1. Install docker, podman, and distrobox.
2. Run the following command to make a distro container for Ubuntu 22.04:

distrobox-create --name ros --image ubuntu:22.04

3. Log inside the created container:

distrobox enter ros

4. Install the ROS2 distribution following the instruction for ubuntu 22.04 inside the container.

Example Usage §

1. Log inside the ubuntu container we just created by:

distrobox enter ros

2. In one ros container terminal, source the setup file and then run a C++ talker:

source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash
ros2 run demo_nodes_cpp talker

3. In another ros container terminal, source the setup file and then run a Python listener:

source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash
ros2 run demo_nodes_py listener

You should see the talker saying that it’s Publishing messages and the listener saying I heard those messages. This verifies both the C++ and Python APIs are working properly. yayyyy!

Additional Setup §

1. ROS requires the setup.bash file to be sourced every time before running it. This can be automated by adding the following line in your .bashrc .

source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash

2. This might cause error on the host terminal because the /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash is only on the container.

# Error: bash: /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash: No such file or directory

3. To fix that add the following snippet at the end of your .bashrc file instead of the above mentioned line.

# ROS
if [ "$(grep Ubuntu /etc/issue | awk '{print $1}')" == "Ubuntu" ]; then
	source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash
fi

4. The clear command might not work inside the container, to fix that run the following command on your terminal. (It adds export TERM=linux in your .bash_profile)

echo 'export TERM=linux' >> ~/.bash_profile

5. We need to log into the container every time we launch a new terminal so it’s better to make a shortcut to log straight to the container terminal.

# For most terminals the shortcut can be set as:
<terminal-name> -e distrobox enter ros