Install ROS on your computer

Having ROS on your host machine has many advantages. First of all, it allows you to communicate with nodes running on your Leo Rover, so it is easier to introspect ROS network. Also, it lets you run nodes on your computer, so you can launch part of the node network in your host machine such as graphical interfaces and visualization tools.

There is a couple of ROS installation options depending on your system:

Linux Installation

If you have Linux distribution installed (either natively or on virtual machine), you can follow instructions on ROS wiki.

ROS repository contains prebuild packages for ubuntu and debian systems. Melodic distribution requires Ubuntu Bionic (18.04 LTS) or Debian Stretch. Noetic requires Ubuntu Focal (20.04 LTS) or Debian Buster.

Windows Subsystem for Linux

Ensure that Windows Subsystem for Linux feature is enabled by opening PowerShell as Administrator and running:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

Reboot when prompted.

Install Ubuntu 18.04 from Microsoft Store and open the application.

You can now follow steps from ros installation tutorial on ROS wiki.

To run graphical applications, you need to install X server on Windows. We recommend using VcXsrv. Install it and run with default configuration except for Native OpenGL which should be unchecked (otherwise, rviz may fail to launch)

In your ubuntu session, type:

echo "export DISPLAY=:0" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Now, to test it, run roscore on one session and rqt or rviz on another.