Installing ROS2 via Debian Packages¶

Resources¶

• Status Pages:

  • ROS 2 Crystal (Ubuntu Bionic): amd64, arm64

  • ROS 2 Bouncy (Ubuntu Bionic): amd64, arm64

  • ROS 2 Ardent (Ubuntu Xenial): amd64, arm64

• Jenkins Instance

• Repositories

Setup Locale¶

Make sure you have a locale which supports UTF-8. If you are in a minimal environment, such as a docker container, the locale may be something minimal like POSIX. We test with the following settings. It should be fine if you’re using a different UTF-8 supported locale.

sudo locale-gen en_US en_US.UTF-8
sudo update-locale LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Setup Sources¶

To install the Debian packages you will need to add our Debian repository to your apt sources. First you will need to authorize our gpg key with apt like this:

sudo apt update && sudo apt install curl gnupg2 lsb-release
curl http://repo.ros2.org/repos.key | sudo apt-key add -

And then add the repository to your sources list:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [arch=amd64,arm64] http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu `lsb_release -cs` main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros2-latest.list'

Install ROS 2 packages¶

First set an environment variable for the ROS 2 release you want to install so it can be used in other commands.

export CHOOSE_ROS_DISTRO=crystal  # or bouncy or ardent
sudo apt update

Desktop Install (Recommended): ROS, RViz, demos, tutorials.

sudo apt install ros-$CHOOSE_ROS_DISTRO-desktop

ROS-Base Install (Bare Bones): Communication libraries, message packages, command line tools. No GUI tools.

sudo apt install ros-$CHOOSE_ROS_DISTRO-ros-base

See specific sections below for how to also install the ros1_bridge, TurtleBot packages, or alternative RMW packages.

Environment setup¶

sudo apt install python3-argcomplete

sudo apt install python3-pip
sudo pip3 install argcomplete

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

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

Install additional RMW implementations¶

By default the RMW implementation FastRTPS is used. If using Ardent OpenSplice is also installed.

To install support for OpenSplice or RTI Connext on Bouncy:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ros-$CHOOSE_ROS_DISTRO-rmw-opensplice-cpp # for OpenSplice
sudo apt install ros-$CHOOSE_ROS_DISTRO-rmw-connext-cpp # for RTI Connext (requires license agreement)

By setting the environment variable RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_opensplice_cpp you can switch to use OpenSplice instead. For ROS 2 releases Bouncy and newer, RMW_IMPLEMENTATION=rmw_connext_cpp can also be selected to use RTI Connext.

If you want to install the Connext DDS-Security plugins please refer to this page.

Install additional packages using ROS 1 packages¶

The ros1_bridge as well as the TurtleBot demos are using ROS 1 packages. To be able to install them please start by adding the ROS 1 sources as documented here.

If you’re using Docker for isolation you can start with the image ros:melodic or osrf/ros:melodic-desktop (or Kinetic if using Ardent). This will also avoid the need to setup the ROS sources as they will already be integrated.

Now you can install the remaining packages:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ros-$CHOOSE_ROS_DISTRO-ros1-bridge

The turtlebot2 packages are available in Bouncy but not Crystal.

sudo apt install ros-$CHOOSE_ROS_DISTRO-turtlebot2-*

Build your own packages¶

If you would like to build your own packages, refer to the tutorial "Using Colcon to build packages".