ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Creating an ROS package and metapackage

As explained before, creating packages can be done manually, but to avoid the tedious work involved, we will use the catkin_create_pkg command-line tool.

We will create the new package in our recently initialized workspace using the following commands:

    $ cd ~/dev/catkin_ws/src
    $ catkin_create_pkg chapter2_tutorials std_msgs roscpp  

The format of this command includes the name of the package and the dependencies that will have the package, in our case, std_msgs and roscpp. This is shown in the following command:

    catkin_create_pkg [package_name] [dependency1] ... [dependencyN]  

The following dependencies are included:

• std_msgs: This contains common message types representing primitive data types and ...