First steps

Installing the requirements

Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 LTS

We recommend you use Ubuntu 16.04 for your development environment. In general, our repository and its related components have been tested using Ubuntu Xenial. Keep in mind that the robots in the lab will also be setup with the latest compatible Ubuntu distribution.

If you are not currently using Ubuntu, you can download it to your computer from http://www.ubuntu.com/download

ROS Kinetic officially supports Ubuntu Wily (15.10) and Ubuntu Xenial (16.04 LTS). To see other supported platforms please see the ROS Kinetic installation instructions.

It is possible to set up a different operating system for your development environment. However is the support for those options very limited or not given at all. In the following you find an approach for Arch-Linux that has been applied by some students, already.

Arch-linux

It is possible to setup your development environment by using a Docker-based setup locally.

ROS - Robot Operating System

The current supported version of ROS is Kinetic Kame. To install ROS, follow the official installation instructions found here:

ROS Kinetic - http://wiki.ros.org/kinetic/Installation/Ubuntu

Don't forget to initialize rosdep:

sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

Finally, a few recommended tools that you can install include wstool and catkin-tools:

sudo apt install python-wstool python-catkin-tools

Git - Version Control

Installation

Install the Git core components and some additional GUI's for the version control:

 sudo apt-get install git-core gitg gitk

Set Up Git

Now it's time to configure your settings. To do this you need to open a new Terminal. First you need to tell git your name, so that it can properly label the commits you make:

 git config --global user.name "Your Name Here"

Git also saves your email address into the commits you make.

 git config --global user.email "[e-mail]"

Add your ssh key to GitHub

It is recommended that you use ssh to connect to GitHub. For more information you can read GitHub's documentation on ssh here.

Make sure that you are following the instructions for Linux.

GitHub setup

Make sure you have joined the b-it-bots organization by visiting https://github.com/b-it-bots

Fork the b-it-bots@home repositories

Depending on what you are working on, you might want to fork different repositories. For most people working on the following areas, mas_domestic_robotics will be more than enough, but here are some other repositories you might want to fork:

Manipulation

Required:

• mas_domestic_robotics

Speech

Navigation

Perception

Planning

HRI

To find out how to fork a repo, use GitHub's guide.