This is a layer to provide ROS Indigo Igloo in an OpenEmbedded Linux system. It provides a stable cross-compilation build system for many common ROS packages. Currently, this layer is still under continuous development.

IMPORTANT RESOURCES

• Source Code Repository: https://github.com/bmwcarit/meta-ros.git
• Issue Tracker: https://github.com/bmwcarit/meta-ros/issues
• Discussion Forum: http://discourse.ros.org/c/openembedded
• Installation Guide: http://wiki.ros.org/hydro/Installation/OpenEmbedded
• Development Guides:
  • https://github.com/bmwcarit/meta-ros/wiki/Guidelines-for-ROS-recipes
  • https://github.com/bmwcarit/meta-ros/wiki/Developer-Guidelines

Note: In October 2016, the mailing list at https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/meta-ros has been discontinued and discussion has moved to http://discourse.ros.org/c/openembedded. However, the mailing list is still a good resource on issues that have been resolved in the past.

MAINTAINERS

• Lukas Bulwahn, BMW Car IT GmbH lukas.bulwahn@oss.bmw-carit.de
• Stefan Herbrechtsmeier, Bielefeld University stefan@herbrechtsmeier.net
• Kristof Robot krirobo@gmail.com
• Dmitry Rozhkov, Intel dmitry.rozhkov@linux.intel.com

CONTRIBUTORS

• Lukas Bulwahn, BMW Car IT GmbH lukas.bulwahn@oss.bmw-carit.de
• Stefan Herbrechtsmeier, Bielefeld University stefan@herbrechtsmeier.net
• Tobias Weigl, BMW Car IT GmbH tobias.weigl@bmw-carit.de
• Kartik Mohta kartikmohta@gmail.com
• Koen Kooi koen@dominion.thruhere.net
• Victor Mayoral Vilches v.mayoralv@gmail.com
• Sergey 'Jin' Bostandzhyan jin@dev.digitalstrom.org
• Andreas Hildisch, BMW Car IT GmbH andreas.hildisch@bmw-carit.de
• William william@friedcircuits.us
• Kristof Robot krirobo@gmail.com
• Khem Raj raj.khem@gmail.com
• Esteve Fernandez esteve@apache.org
• Jonas Sticha jonas.sticha@bmw-carit.de
• Pascal Bach pascal.bach@siemens.com
• Andreas Galauner andreas@galauner.de
• Peter S. Housel housel@acm.org
• Gauthier Monserand simkim@simkim.net
• Timo Mueller timo.mueller@bmw-carit.de
• Andreas Baak andreas.baak@bmw-carit.de
• Dmitry Rozhkov, Intel dmitry.rozhkov@linux.intel.com

HOW TO CONTRIBUTE

We are still working on this development and are interested in other use cases. If you are interested in this project, please contact us via email. The more people are interested, the more we will be pushing this project. If you want to contribute, please contact us and we can discuss open issues and how to join forces.

DEPENDENCIES

This layer depends on:

openembedded-core
URI: git://git.openembedded.org/openembedded-core
subdirectory: meta
branch: master
revision: HEAD

meta-openembedded (meta-oe)
URI: git://git.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded
subdirectory: meta-oe
branch: master
revision: HEAD

meta-python (since a6d7ba92645a112af358efd94ff3aa0c74985a51@meta-openembedded)
URI: git://git.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded
subdirectory: meta-python
branch: master
revision: HEAD

meta-multimedia (since fe44ac167a2a76531af3519f3889fce92024567b@meta-openembedded)
URI: git://git.openembedded.org/meta-openembedded
subdirectory: meta-multimedia
branch: master
revision: HEAD

meta-intel-realsense (since 4a5ba0f20094dd3d07c0a0c1dede2ba40e9d6abf) URI: https://github.com/IntelRealSense/meta-intel-realsense branch: master revision: HEAD This layer is required only if you need to build realsense-camera driver.

bitbake > 1.20

DEPENDENCIES ON RECENT COMMITS

Here, we list which parts of this layer depend on recent commits in the bitbake, openembedded-core and meta-openembedded repositories. Using git blame on the lines below, you can find the commits in meta-ros that rely on the remote commits. In case of porting to other versions, you must possibly revert some of those commits.

cv-bridge and dependent recipes, e.g., the image-transport recipes, depend on 7568bfdd114597956a1da68746f207ec7f93a48d@openembedded-core. For native python-numpy support, these recipes also depend on c13c5f40160d289bb62538a16900fed30621cb22@meta-openembedded or on 9bf355cceaec6ebacdcbcc35f9713ff73e1c85da@openembedded-core.

Some recipes that need the Eigen library, e.g., the pcl-ros recipe, depend on 424e3c1b930c0103c2cedfd4df1671e84a5256d5@meta-openembedded.

Using wildcards in bbappend versions part in name depends on 31bc9af9cd56e7b318924869970e850993fafc5f@bitbake and 991cbeedbde8bd25ce08c669b1bfac8b99e33149@bitbake.

octomap-ros and collada-urdf depend on 43073569cb67d98c11aa71211d77b566b64f9145@openembedded-core and 783fb88f476c94d5d4f4b954f7053464d9a6dff5@openembedded-core.

urdfdom-py depends on the meta-python layer since a6d7ba92645a112af358efd94ff3aa0c74985a51@meta-openembedded.

Since 3edf08b38b0af93cef0933b061349264dc86d54c@openembedded-core, recipes relying on opencv need to activate the DISTRO_FEATURE opengl.

rosbridge-library depends on python-six, which is provided in meta-python since a36869c700bed940f7f0aa4b9703ae630dc84eac@meta-openembedded.

INSTALLATION

The repository contains a layer for ROS that builds on top of the OpenEmbedded Core layer and the meta-oe layer.

We try our best to keep up with the development of the current HEAD of the layers mentioned above. If you notice any problems with the current HEAD, please report this in our issue tracker.

You can use this layer with earlier versions of the layers mentioned above and their release branches, dora and daisy, with a few minor adjustments. The section "dependencies on recent commits" in this file provides a few pointers to adjust this layer for other versions.

USAGE

Initialize the build environment:

source oe-init-build-env

Add the required layers (see DEPENDENCIES) by modifying ./conf/bblayers.conf (adjust /home/me/devel as necessary):

BBLAYERS ?= " \
/home/me/devel/openembedded-core/meta \
/home/me/devel/meta-openembedded/meta-oe \
/home/me/devel/meta-openembedded/meta-python \
/home/me/devel/meta-openembedded/meta-multimedia \
/home/me/devel/meta-ros \
"

By default meta-ros uses python2 in all its recipes. If you want ROS packages to use python3 then add the following line in your ./conf/local.conf file:

ROS_USE_PYTHON3 = "yes"

Compile package:

bitbake <package-name>

The recipe core-image-ros-roscore provides a minimal Linux system that runs roscore.

You can compile the minimal Linux system with

bitbake core-image-ros-roscore

Then for example, you start this system in the qemu virtual machine with

runqemu <MACHINE> core-image-ros-roscore

On the Linux system, ensure that the own host's name in resolved by adding

127.0.0.1	<HOSTNAME>.localdomain		<HOSTNAME>

to the /etc/hosts file, and set up the environment with

export ROS_ROOT=/opt/ros
export ROS_DISTRO=indigo
export ROS_PACKAGE_PATH=/opt/ros/indigo/share
export PATH=$PATH:/opt/ros/indigo/bin
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/opt/ros/indigo/lib
export PYTHONPATH=/opt/ros/indigo/lib/python2.7/site-packages
export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://localhost:11311
export CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=/opt/ros/indigo
touch /opt/ros/indigo/.catkin

Finally, you can start roscore with

roscore

If you want to use the roswtf utility for diagnostics and experience an exception like

rospkg.os_detect.OsNotDetected: Could not detect OS, tried ['windows', 'ubuntu', 'slackware', 'rhel', 'qnx', 'osx', 'opensuse', 'opensuse', 'mint', 'linaro', 'gentoo', 'funtoo', 'freebsd', 'fedora', 'elementary', 'debian', 'cygwin', 'centos', 'arch']

then you need to set ROS_OS_OVERRIDE to one of the listed OS names, e.g.

export ROS_OS_OVERRIDE=ubuntu

And since Yocto-based distributions are not supported by the rospkg library you have to interpret roswtf's output by translating Ubuntu package names manually to their corresponding package/recipe names that were chosen in the meta-ros layer.

CROSS-COMPILING ALL ROS PACKAGES IN meta-ros

The meta-ros layers only includes a subset of the officially released ROS packages, available from packages.ros.org. The here provided ROS packages are mainly driven by the current users' needs.

For ROS packages that depend on cv-bridge, the commercial license flag must be whitelisted, as cv-bridge depends on opencv, and opencv by default depends on libav that has special terms and conditions when used commercially. This can be done by adding to the local.conf the line:

LICENSE_FLAGS_WHITELIST = "commercial"

Alternatively, the dependency from opencv on libav can be explicit excluded by modifying the PACKAGECONFIG setting.

LICENSE

All metadata is MIT licensed unless otherwise stated. Source code included in tree for individual recipes is under the LICENSE stated in each recipe (.bb file) unless otherwise stated. The descriptions in the recipes of ROS packages have been extracted from the ROS wiki (http://www.ros.org/wiki/) and are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) unless otherwise noted.

This README document is Copyright (C) 2012 BMW Car IT GmbH.

REDISTRIBUTIONS

The log4cxx recipe originated from the recipe in the OpenEmbedded (Classic) Development (cf. http://cgit.openembedded.org/openembedded/tree/recipes/log4cxx) licensed with the MIT License.

The yaml-cpp recipe originated from the recipe in Kartik Mohta's OpenEmbedded layer (cf. https://github.com/kartikmohta/meta-km/blob/master/recipes-devtools/yaml-cpp/yaml-cpp_0.3.0.bb) licensed with the MIT License.

The core-image-ros-* recipes originated from the core-image-minimal recipe in OpenEmbedded Core (cf. http://cgit.openembedded.org/openembedded-core/tree/meta/recipes-core/images/core-image-minimal.bb) licensed with the MIT License.

The original or modified files are redistributed here under the same MIT License.