Install ROS and Gazebo on Ubuntu Linux 14.04

To achieve ROS integration with stand-alone Gazebo, the following steps may be followed.

Install ROS

Follow this tutorial: Ubuntu install of ROS.

Install Gazebo

Follow this tutorial: Install Gazebo using Ubuntu packages.

A crash course

This tutorial is a discovery of ROS and Gazebo, from a minimum set of prerequisites to a working example. It will give you the “big picture” and point out the main principles of robotics, ROS and Gazebo: a crash course to ROS and Gazebo. Note that, to make the tutorial work, you need to install the ros-jade-controller-manager by using the following command: ``sudo apt-get install ros-jade-controller-manager''.

Useful notes

Easy way to test a model:

roslaunch rrbot_description rrbot_rviz.launch

A way to generate .xml from .xacro:

rosrun xacro xacro --inorder rrbot.xacro > rrbot.xml

A way to generate .urdf from .xacro:

rosrun xacro xacro --inorder rrbot.xacro > rrbot.urdf 

How to create a ros_controls package

Some important information can be found in the following link: Tutorial: ROS Control.

Troubleshooting

catkin_make

Make Error at /opt/ros/hydro/share/catkin/cmake/catkinConfig.cmake:72 (find_package):
  Could not find a configuration file for package ros_control.

You need to modify: /home/parallels/gazebo_ros_demos/rrbot_control/CMakeLists.txt. Modify this line:

find_package(catkin REQUIRED COMPONENTS ros_control ros_controllers)

to the following one:

find_package(catkin REQUIRED COMPONENTS)

A more organised and complete tutorial

Follow this tutorial: first steps with Gazebo and ROS.

Creating an object population

Follow this tutorial: this tutorial demonstrates how you can create a population of models.

Adding a camera sensor

Follow this tutorial: this tutorial demonstrates how you can add a camera to your robot.

rosrun image_view image_view image:=/mybot/camera1/image_raw

Openni Kinect

Follow this tutorial: this tutorial demonstrates how you use Openni Kinect.