This section deals with loading software packages for the TurtleBot simulator. The physical TurtleBot is not involved because these software packages are loaded on your laptop or desktop computer. It is assumed that Ubuntu 14.04 and ROS Indigo software are installed on the computer that you will use for the simulation. This installation is described in the Installing and launching ROS section in Chapter 1, Getting Started with ROS.
The procedure to load the TurtleBot software on your computer is documented in the tutorial at: http://wiki.ros.org/turtlebot/Tutorials/indigo/PC%20Installation
The installation described on the website will apply to the real TurtleBot netbook also, but we will only consider the simulation here. In a terminal window, type the following command:
$ sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-turtlebot ros-indigo-turtlebot-apps ros-indigo-turtlebot-interactions ros-indigo-turtlebot-simulator ros-indigo-kobuki-ftdi ros-indigo-rocon-remocon ros-indigo-rocon-qt-library ros-indigo-ar-track-alvar-msgs
A large number of ROS packages are loaded by the sudo apt-get command. The groups are as follows:
- The TurtleBot software has ROS packages to simulate the TurtleBot and control the real TurtleBot. The TurtleBot simulator download includes the
turtlebot_gazebopackage. - The Kobuki software consists of ROS packages used to drive or simulate the mobile base.
- The rocon (robots in concert) software is used for multirobot applications.
- The alvar software is used to track markers guiding a robot.
To view the TurtleBot packages downloaded in each category, type the following command:
$ rospack list | grep turtlebot
To see the packages that apply to the base, type the following command:
$ rospack list | grep kobuki
The other software can be viewed in a similar way.