Robot Operating System Cookbook

Environment setup

Well done! We have completed the ROS installation for the ARM platform. The ROS scripts and executables are mostly installed in /opt/ros/<ros_version>.

To get access to these scripts and executables, the ROS environment variables need to be added to the bash session. We have to source the following bash file:

$ source /opt/ros/<ros_version>/setup.bash

It's convenient if the ROS environment variables are automatically added to the bash session every time a new shell is launched:

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

If we have more than one ROS distribution installed, ~/.bashrc must only source the setup.bash for the version we are currently using:

$ source /opt/ros/<ros_version>/setup.bash ...