ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Installing the ROS driver for the Leap Motion controller

To interface the Leap Motion with ROS, we will need the ROS driver for it. Here is the link to get the ROS driver for Leap Motion; you can clone it using the command:

    $ git clone https://github.com/ros-drivers/leap_motion

Before installing the leap_motion driver package, we have to do a few things to have it properly compiled.

The first step is to set the path of the Leap Motion SDK in the .bashrc file. Assuming that the Leap SDK is in the user's home folder with the name LeapSDK, we have to set the path variable in .bashrc as follows.

    $ export LEAP_SDK=$LEAP_SDK:$HOME/LeapSDK

This environment variable is needed for compiling the code of the ROS driver, which has Leap SDK APIs.