Setting up ROS on Ubuntu on Android on a mobile phone

How to set up ROS on Ubuntu on Android on a mobile phone.

I had some build errors when "Building the higher-level/tools (Layer 2)", but roscore, turtlesim, rxconsole, rxgraph, and rxplot work.

An overview of the steps:

• Rooted your phone. (Beyond the scope of this wiki page)
• Install the Terminal Emulator program from the Google Play app store.
• Download "Complete Linux Installer" from the Google Play app store.
• Use that to download and install Ubuntu (large version).
• Follow the guide in the Complete Linux Installer (unzip the image, and move it)
• Make the .img file bigger because there is not enough space for ROS. In the terminal, outside of Ubuntu: :

cd /mnt/sdcard/ubuntu
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1M count=1000000 >> ubuntu.img

(the "count" may have to be adjusted, or this command executed multiple times until the image is big enough)

• - Follow the instructions on the [http://wiki/fuerte/Installation/Debian|ROS Debian install page.] - There are a couple of lines in turtle.cpp that need to be changed to get it to compile (typecast a constant to qword in the std::max function call) - As per http://answers.ros.org/question/36890/unable-to-find-swigswg-and-unable-to-find-pythonswg/, cp -r /swig /usr/local/share.

It's slow, but it seems to be faster than the Rasperry Pi.

Screenshot: