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Setting Up a System to Run ARIAC 2017

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The ARIAC 2017 competition is complete. If you are interested in competing in an active ARIAC competition you are probably in the wrong place: this page is only available for archival reasons.

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This tutorial will walk you through the setup required to make a computer ready to run ARIAC.

In order to run ARIAC your computer will need a discrete graphics card and will need to satisfy the minimum System Requirements.

In order to run ARIAC your computer will need a discrete graphics card and will need to satisfy the minimum System Requirements.

In order to run ARIAC your computer will need a discrete graphics card and will need to satisfy the minimum System Requirements.

Note: this tutorial will only work with ROS indigo (Ubuntu Trusty 14.04) or ROS kinetic (Ubuntu Xenial 16.04). ROS indigo is recommended.

Please select the appropriate ROS version from the tabs at the top of this page.

ARIAC 2017 is only supported on ROS indigo and ROS kinetic.

Installing Gazebo7

ARIAC 2017 requires Gazebo7 to be installed, with version 7.5.0 or higher. Instructions for installing Gazebo can be found here:

http://gazebosim.org/tutorials?tut=install_ubuntu&cat=install#Alternativeinstallation:step-by-step

The "alternative installation" steps in the above link will be summarized here. You could use the "one-liner" installation, but it would not guarantee that you get Gazebo7.

Setup Ubuntu to Install Packages from the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF)

First you need to add OSRF's package repository to your system so it can install packages from there. Do so by running this command:

Next you need to add the signing key to your computer so the packages can be verified:

Installing Gazebo

First update the apt-get database since you added the OSRF packages repository to the sources list:

Finally, install gazebo7:

Installing ROS

Next you need to install ROS, which ARIAC uses to provide the competition interface. Instructions to do this can be found here:

Please select a supported ROS version at the top of the page.

These instructions will be summarized next.

Setup Ubuntu to Install Packages from ROS

First add the ROS packages repository to apt-get's list of sources:

Then add the key ROS uses to sign the packages:

Installing ROS Desktop

ROS has a few "variants" which contain commonly used components, e.g. "Robot" is a small set of things that you'd run on a deployed robot, "Desktop" is a superset of "Robot" that also contains tools you might use on a workstation, and "Desktop-Full" additionally has perception algorithms and simulators.

Normally ROS Indigo uses Gazebo2, but since ARIAC uses Gazebo7 you will need to avoid installing "Desktop-Full" and instead install the "Desktop" set of packages and then manually install the Gazebo7 version of the Gazebo-ROS compatibility packages afterwards.

First update apt-get's database since you added the ROS repositories to the list of sources:

Then install the "Desktop" packages ROS $ROS_DISTRO:

To finish the ROS $ROS_DISTRO installation, initialize the rosdep database:

Installing Gazebo-ROS Compatibility Packages

Now install the Gazebo-ROS compatibility packages:

  • sudo apt-get install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-gazebo-ros-pkgs ros-$ROS_DISTRO-gazebo-ros-control

Now install the Gazebo7 version of the Gazebo-ROS compatibility packages:

  • sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-gazebo7-ros-pkgs ros-indigo-gazebo7-ros-control

Please select a supported ROS version at the top of the page.

Installing Additional Dependencies

Install the following package which is needed to run the ARIAC examples:

Installing the ARIAC 2017 packages from Binaries

You can either install the ARIAC packages from binaries (recommended) or by building the software locally on your machine.

Please select a supported ROS version at the top of the page.

  • sudo apt-get install ariac

To finish your install, source the ROS setup.bash file:

This sets up your shell to run the ROS commands needed to run ARIAC. There is also a setup.zsh if you are using that shell.

So that the above line will be automatically run when you open new terminal windows, put it in your bashrc:

Alternative: Building the ARIAC packages from Source

This strategy is only recommended for a few cases:

Setting Up a Catkin Workspace

Since the ARIAC packages are catkin packages, we'll start by setting up a catkin workspace. First create a folder for the workspace, something like this:

The src folder will contain the source code you want to build.

Getting the Source Code

Next you will need to get the ARIAC source code. You can either "clone" the source using git or you can extract an archive of the source that you downloaded from BitBucket. To clone the source:

If you would prefer to download the source as an archive:

Building the ARIAC Packages

Before starting the build, you need to source the ROS setup.bash file:

This sets up your shell to build on top of ROS. There is also a setup.zsh if you are using that shell.

Next start the build using the catkin build tool called catkin_make:

This will build the ARIAC packages and install them to a local folder, in this case ~/ariac_ws/install next to the src folder.

This folder will also have a setup.bash file in it that you can source before building your own competition packages:

Note that sourcing the setup.bash file in the devel space does not work, see this issue for updates.

So that the above line will be automatically run when you open new terminal windows, put it in your bashrc:

Using ARIAC

See the ARIAC interface tutorial for how to run ARIAC.


2022-05-28 12:26