ROS Programming: Building Powerful Robots

Setting up the environment

Congratulations! If you are at this step, you have an installed version of ROS on your system! To start using it, the system needs to know the location of the executable or binary files, as well as the other commands. To do this, normally you need to execute the next script; if you also install another ROS distro, you can work with both just by calling the script of the one you need each time, since this script simply sets your environment. Here, we use the one for ROS Kinetic, but just replace kinetic with indigo or jade, for example, if you want to try other distros:

$ source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash

If you type roscore in the shell, you will see something starting up. This is the best test for finding out ...