Hands-On ROS for Robotics Programming

Setting up the workspace

To start using contributed ROS packages or to create your own, you will need to have a workspace in which to put the code. The step-by-step procedure to accomplish such a task is as follows:

1. From a bash terminal, create a folder and initialize the workspace:

$ mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src$ catkin_init_workspace

The initialization is as simple as creating a symlink to a file definition located in the ROS installation folder. If you list files in the src folder, then you will see the new CMakeLists.txt file pointing to /opt/ros/melodic/share/catkin/cmake/toplevel.cmake:

$ ls -la... CMakeLists.txt -> /opt/ros/melodic/share/catkin/cmake/toplevel.cmake

2. Next, build the workspace:

$ cd ~/catkin_ws$ catkin_make ...