Sec. 1: Installation of dependencies
We used ROS Indigo in this tutorial. But the tutorial could work even in ROS Kinetic/Lunar, although we did not validate it in Kinetic Kame.
We recommend you install ros-indigo-desktop-full so that you have all the necessary packages. The full package comes with Gazebo 2.2 as default. We recommend using a desktop PC or a laptop with Ubuntu 14.04+.
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-desktop-full
For more help with ROS installation, follow the instructions here: https://wiki.ros.org/indigo/installation
If you do not have the gazebo_ros package, then install it using:
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-gazebo-ros
Make sure the stand-alone Gazebo works by running in terminal:
gazebo
You will see the GUI open with an empty world. To see where you install Gazebo, and if it is in the correct location, run:
which gzserver
which gzclient
It should say
/usr/bin/gzserver
/usr/bin/gzclient
The gazebo_ros_pkgs packages are available in:
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-gazebo-ros-pkgs ros-indigo-gazebo-ros-control
We now run Gazebo. Before doing it, be sure to always source the appropriate ROS setup file, which for Indigo is done like so:
source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash
Assuming your ROS and Gazebo environment have been properly set up and built, you should now be able to run Gazebo through a simple rosrun command, after launching roscore if needed. Run roscore first:
roscore
Open another terminal and run:
rosrun gazebo_ros gazebo
The Gazebo GUI should appear with nothing inside the viewing window. To verify that the proper ROS connections are set up, view the available ROS topics:
rostopic list
You should see within the lists topics such as:
/gazebo/link_states
/gazebo/model_states
/gazebo/parameter_descriptions
/gazebo/parameter_updates
/gazebo/set_link_state
/gazebo/set_model_state
Open a terminal, and enter the following:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-husky-desktop
sudo apt-get install ros-indigo-husky-simulator
If everything looks good, then everything is good. We drive a robot now!