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Installation

This section explains how to install the robot_suite directly on your machine (ie. not in Docker). To install with Docker, please refer to Docker installation.

Prerequisites

The robot suite was only tested with :

  • ROS2 Humble (on Ubuntu 22.04)
  • ROS2 Jazzy (on Ubuntu 24.04)

Important

If you want to install the robot_suite directly on your host (without Docker), make sure to create a virtual environment and perform the installation within the environment.

Also make sure that ROS2 will look for packages inside your environment, to avoid missing dependencies errors.

You can follow instructions in the next section to setup your virtual environment before installing the robot_suite. If your virtual environment is already set, feel free to jump to Automatic Installation.

Virtual environment setup

Steps

  1. Create the virtual environment using python3-venv

    python -m venv <path_to_environment> --system-site-packages

    Make sure to replace <path_to_environment> with the actual path where you want your environment to be created. It is important to add the --system-site-packages flag for colcon to access required system packages.

  2. Activate your environment 

    source <path_to_environment>/bin/activate

  3. If your virtual environment is located inside the src folder (ie <your_workspace_name>/src) , you have to make sure that colcon won't attempt to build it. You can do this with the following command:

    touch <path_to_environment>/COLCON_IGNORE

Now that you are done with setting the virtual environment up, you can proceed with the installation.

A script is provided to automatically install all dependencies and setup the workspace. The robot type needs to be specified as an argument to the script. The available options are:

  • tello: for the Tello drone
  • spot: for the Spot robot
  • unitree_go1: for the Unitree Go1 robot (Not yet supported)
sudo ./bootstrap.sh [robot]

Running the script

Make sure to run the script with sudo.

Manual Installation

If you prefer to install the dependencies manually, you will first need to ensure your robot driver is installed properly. Additionally, pip packages are required which can be found in the requirements.txt file. You can install them using the following command:

pip install -r requirements.txt

For ros dependencies, you can use the following command:

rosdep install --from-paths . -r -y

Note

Here you can find the robot drivers:

Build

Note

The bootstrap.sh file automatically builds the robot_suite with colcon. So any later build after the script was successfully executed is a rebuild.

Build Steps

  1. Sourcing the virtual environment 
    source <path_to_environment>/bin/activate

  2. Sourcing ROS2

    • Use this command if you have never built the robot_suite before.
      Make sure to replace <ros-distro> with you ROS2 distribution (e.g humble, jazzy).
    source /opt/ros/<ros-distro>/setup.bash
    • If you have already built the suite (ie. build and install folders exist inside your workspace), use this command instead:
    source <path_to_robot_suite>/install/setup.bash

    Make sure to replace <path_to_robot_suite> with the actual path pointing to where you installed the suite.

  3. Building the suite with colcon.

    cd <path_to_robot_suite>
python3 -m colcon build --symlink-install