Installing ROS on a remote PC to control Nao

Prerequisite

In order to run a remote ROS bridge, please get sure that you installed all necessary Aldebaran and ROS packages. In doubt, refer to Install Instructions

Install Remote ROS Packages

Go inside the src folder inside your catkin workspace.

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src

If the src folder does not exist, you probably skipped the catkin/Tutorials/create_a_workspace" step. Go back and do it !

In the src folder, create a .rosinstall file and open it.

$ touch .rosinstall
$ vim .rosinstall

Then copy paste the following text (don’t forget the ‘-’ at the beginning of the lines)

- git: {local-name: naoqi_bridge, uri: "https://github.com/ros-naoqi/naoqi_bridge.git", version: master}
- git: {local-name: nao_robot, uri: "https://github.com/ros-naoqi/nao_robot.git", version: master}
- git: {local-name: nao_extras, uri: "https://github.com/ros-naoqi/nao_extras.git", version: master}
- setup-file: {local-name: ../devel/setup.bash }

Save and close. Then, in order to fetch and update the packages from github run the following wstool command

$ wstool update

Then, compile and setup your ros workspace

$ cd ..
$ catkin_make
$ source devel/setup.bash

!NOTE! It is a good practice to add the following line to your .bashrc file. It will avoid weird behavior in the future by setting your catkin workspace as the default one.

$ echo "source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc

C++ bridge installation

By default, the previous section only installs the Python version of the bridge. This requires basically no compiling, but rather a linking of python scripts. There exists also a C++ version, which might be faster to execute.

At this point we assume that you have access to the Naoqi C++ SDK. For this tutorial, we downloaded C++ SDK 2.1 Linux 64.

Execute the following commands for extracting, installing the SDK and checking the installation. We included a separate cmake file for finding the C++ Naoqi SDK, which requires the AL_DIR environment variable to point to the installation of the SDK. So we have to set it, preferably inside your .bashrc

$ echo "export AL_DIR=~/naoqi-sdk-2.1.2.17-linux64" >> ~/.bashrc
$ source ~/.bashrc
$ cd ~/catkin_ws
$ catkin_make