Raspberry Pi

ROS on Windows 10

ROS is an amazing system for running robots. At Raspberry Valley, we learn ROS the typical way: with a notebook setup and ROS on Raspberry Pi. Now typically, your notebook should run Ubuntu (On the Pi we run Ubuntu Mate) - which might be hard for some.

We decided to run Ubuntu and ROS on a Windows 10 notebook, by utilizing the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This article describes how.

ROS Installation on WSL - Kinetic

The process of installing ROS on WSL depends on which release you wish to target. We will install Kinetic in this guide (as we target Ubuntu 16.04 which works with the process), but you can similarly install other distros (as long as your Ubuntu version is supported).

ros kinetic logo

  • First, install WSL and Bash for Windows. We have a separate recipe here: Windows Subsystem for Linux
  • Open the Ubuntu bash. You can open it in the DOS prompt, in PowerShell or in another shell of your choice. Typically, you open up a DOS prompt and type
bash
  • Install ROS Kinetic. The steps boil down to running the following commands, however to learn more, you can follow the guide and explanation here: Kinetic Installation on ROS Wiki. To complete these steps you need to wait a bit
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://ha.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-key 421C365BD9FF1F717815A3895523BAEEB01FA116
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y ros-kinetic-desktop-full
  • Initialize ROS
sudo rosdep init
rosdep update
  • Setup the environment (every bash session you start will reference your Kinetic installation)
echo "source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
  • Install commonly used dependencies
sudo apt-get install python-rosinstall python-rosinstall-generator python-wstool build-essential