The following instructions are meant as guideline which tutorials to follow in order to get a well-configured ROS workspace that can be used to run and develop the IAI software.

It is strongly recommended to use Ubuntu Linux as operating system. While other OSs may work, they will more manual adaptations may be needed that require good knowledge of Linux and build systems.

Follow the main installation tutorial for your distribution and choose the mirror from Freiburg for downloading the packages. It's much faster in Europe than the main ros.org server. To get a good first set of ROS packages, it is recommended to install the ros-fuerte-desktop-full package.

After the installation, you need to initialize your rosdep rules. These rules specify system dependencies of ROS packages; the rosdep tool can be used to automatically resolve them.

sudo rosdep init

The ROS core components are installed as binary .deb packages into /opt/ros and should not be edited. Every ROS package that you are developing on should reside in your ROS workspace, a directory in your home directory.

ROS packages are found by the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH environment variable that is evaluated from the beginning, i.e. ROS uses the first package with the given name that is found in the directories listed in the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH. This means that you can override the system packages by putting (newer) versions of them into your local ROS workspace folder, which is always more upfront in the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH.

The following tutorials introduces the rosws tool that makes it easy to create an overlay and that manages the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH for you. Please read both before setting up your environment.

• http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Tutorials/InstallingandConfiguringROSEnvironment
• http://www.ros.org/wiki/fuerte/Installation/Overlays

Copy the following rosinstall rules into a text file in your ROS workspace, e.g. yourname.rosinstall.

  - git: {local-name: stacks/cram_core, uri: 'git://github.com/cram-code/cram_core.git'}
  - git: {local-name: stacks/cram_highlevel, uri: 'git://github.com/cram-code/cram_highlevel.git'}
  - git: {local-name: stacks/cram_pr2, uri: 'git://github.com/cram-code/cram_pr2.git'}
  - git: {local-name: stacks/cram_physics, uri: 'git://github.com/cram-code/cram_physics.git'}
  - svn: {local-name: stacks/knowrob, uri: 'http://code.in.tum.de/pubsvn/knowrob/tags/latest'}
  - git: {local-name: stacks/knowrob_addons, uri: 'git@github.com:knowrob/knowrob_addons.git'}
  - git: {local-name: stacks/knowrob_gui, uri: 'git@github.com:knowrob/knowrob_gui.git'}
  - git: {local-name: stacks/knowrob_human, uri: 'git@github.com:knowrob/knowrob_human.git'}
  - git: {local-name: stacks/knowrob_tutorials, uri: 'git@github.com:knowrob/knowrob_tutorials.git'}

You can then install the respective ROS stacks into your workspace using

rosws merge yourname.rosinstall
rosws update

ROS provides a clear way of specifying and resolving dependencies. If you download a new ROS stack “your_stack” you can compile it using the following procedure:

1. Add the stack to your ROS workspace (choose the respective version control system):

rosws set stacks/your_stack --git git://github.com/code_iai/your_stack.git
rosws set stacks/your_stack --git

- Check out the sources
rosws update

1. Resolve system dependencies

rosdep update

rosdep install your_stack

1. Check if all ROS package dependencies are available (should list all dependencies and not return any errors)

rospack depends your_stack

- Locate and install missing ROS dependencies: For each package that rospack complained about,