For robotics application, one of the leading set of tools is Robot Operating System (ROS). The version of ROS that runs on the Jetson AGX Xavier is ROS Melodic. Installing ROS on the Jetson Xavier is simple. Looky here:
Background
ROS was originally developed at Stanford University as a platform to integrate methods drawn from all areas of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, vision, navigation, planning, reasoning, and speech/natural language processing.
From 2008 until 2013, development on ROS was performed primarily at the robotics research company Willow Garage who open sourced the code. During that time, researchers at over 20 different institutions collaborated with Willow Garage and contributed to the code base. In 2013, ROS stewardship transitioned to the Open Source Robotics Foundation.
From the ROS website:
The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a flexible framework for writing robot software. It is a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions that aim to simplify the task of creating complex and robust robot behavior across a wide variety of robotic platforms.
Why? Because creating truly robust, general-purpose robot software is hard. From the robot’s perspective, problems that seem trivial to humans often vary wildly between instances of tasks and environments. Dealing with these variations is so hard that no single individual, laboratory, or institution can hope to do it on their own.
Core Components
At the lowest level, ROS offers a message passing interface that provides inter-process communication. Like most message passing systems, ROS has a publish/subscribe mechanism along with request/response procedure calls. An important thing to remember about ROS, and one of the reason that it is so powerful, is that you can run the system on a heterogeneous group of computers. This allows you to distribute tasks across different systems easily.
For example, you may want to have the Jetson running as the main node, and controlling other processors as control subsystems. A concrete example is to have the Jetson doing a high level task like path planning, and instructing micro controllers to perform lower level tasks like controlling motors to drive the robot to a goal.
At a higher level, ROS provides facilities and tools for a Robot Description Language, diagnostics, pose estimation, localization, navigation and visualization.
You can read more about the Core Components here.
Installation
There is a repository on the JetsonHacks account on Github named installROSXavier.
The main script, installROS.sh, is a straightforward implementation of the install instructions taken from the ROS Wiki. The instructions install ROS Melodic on the Jetson Xavier.
You can clone the repository on the Jetson:
$ git clone https://github.com/jetsonhacks/installROSXavier.git
$ cd installROSXavier
installROS.sh
The install script installROS.sh will install the prerequisites and ROS packages specified. Usage:
Usage: ./installROS.sh [[-p package] | [-h]]
-p | --package <packagename> ROS package to install
Multiple Usage allowed
The first package should be a base package. One of the following:
ros-melodic-ros-base
ros-melodic-desktop
ros-melodic-desktop-full
Default is ros-melodic-ros-base if no packages are specified.
Example Usage:
$ ./installROS.sh -p ros-melodic-desktop -p ros-melodic-rgbd-launch
This script installs a baseline ROS environment. There are several tasks:
- Enable repositories universe, multiverse, and restricted
- Adds the ROS sources list
- Sets the needed keys
- Loads specified ROS packages (defaults to ros-melodic-base-ros if none specified)
- Initializes rosdep
You can edit this file to add the ROS packages for your application.
setupCatkinWorkspace.sh
setupCatkinWorkspace.sh builds a Catkin Workspace.
Usage:
$ ./setupCatkinWorkspace.sh [optionalWorkspaceName]
where optionalWorkspaceName is the name and path of the workspace to be used. The default workspace name is catkin_ws. If a path is not specified, the default path is the current home directory. This script also sets up some ROS environment variables.
The script sets placeholders for some ROS environment variables in the file .bashrc
.bashrc is located in the home directory. The names of the variables are (they should be towards the bottom of the .bashrc file):
- ROS_MASTER_URI
- ROS_IP
The script sets ROS_MASTER_URI to the local host, and basically lists the network interfaces after the ROS_IP entry. You will need to configure these variables for your robots network configuration. Refer to the script for further details.
Notes
- In the video, the Jetson AGX Xavier was flashed with L4T 31.0.2 using JetPack 4.1. L4T 31.0.2 is an Ubuntu 18.04 derivative.
16 Responses
Is there Any way to go around this error?
using gazebo;
gzclient: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libavdevice.so.57: undefined symbol: drmModeFreeFB
This appears to be a known issue. Please see the NVIDIA AGX Jetson Developer Forum: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1042381/problem-with-gazebo-/
Thanks for reading!
it is different from your search. Have you tried it on a machine? Does this solve the issue? No. I tried it a month ago and that thread on forum is unrelated to the core of the problem.
If it works, could you send a screenshot link here as reply?
Works for me.
Did you try that exactly and it does not work?
You can follow the thread on the Jetson AGX Forum: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1042381/jetson-agx-xavier/problem-with-gazebo-/post/5287315/#5287315
Other people have gotten it to work with described workaround.
This appears to be an issue with some of the symbolic links. Try:
Note that this will probably be changed later in the release cycle
That changes with release as Nvidia does not want to support ffmpeg officially. Your suggestion is a weak solution. Once upgraded to new jetpack, other problems might arise as well.
The gazebo works well if ffmpeg is installed from source and replace affected dynamic libraries with the previous ones. gazebo 8 just works on old ffmpeg libraries. that is another problem too.
Thank you for sharing your opinion. You forgot to point out that L4T 31.0.2 is a developers preview, which means that it is not released software. The point of the developers preview is to provide developers early access, and find issues before the software ships. This appears to be an issue.
is it appropriate for the new jetpack 4.2 on the jetson TX2 ? I Will soon try
It should work, though I have not tried it yet. Thanks for reading!
Have you tried? Did it work?
Could u upload a video that how to install Tensorflow on Xavier? Is it the same way on TX2?
TensorFlow support is officially supported by NVIDIA. Please see: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/1042125/jetson-agx-xavier/official-tensorflow-for-jetson-agx-xavier/
Thanks for reading!
I am getting the following error:
E: Unable to locate package ros-melodic-desktop
Hi evryone I am building an agricultural Robot with a less price but good components , Which card have I to chose beetween the TX1 , TX2 , Xavier and multiple Jetson nano ?
Thanks
Hi,
I attempted to run the scripts on NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier, with the latest available Jetpack (Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS (GNU/Linux 5.10.216-tegra aarch64)), and it didn’t work. The log follows.
It would be nice if I could use my Jetson for a robotic project, if there is a solution.
Thank you,
Nikos
======
Here is how it goes:
./installROS.sh -p ros-melodic-desktop
Packages to install: ros-melodic-desktop
Adding repository and source list
‘universe’ distribution component is already enabled for all sources.
‘multiverse’ distribution component is already enabled for all sources.
‘restricted’ distribution component is already enabled for all sources.
Executing: /tmp/apt-key-gpghome.gBGNC0V07R/gpg.1.sh –keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 –recv-key C1CF6E31E6BADE8868B172B4F42ED6FBAB17C654
gpg: key F42ED6FBAB17C654: “Open Robotics ” not changed
gpg: Total number processed: 1
gpg: unchanged: 1
Updating apt-get
Get:1 https://repo.download.nvidia.com/jetson/common r35.6 InRelease [2,555 B]
Hit:2 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports focal InRelease
Get:3 https://repo.download.nvidia.com/jetson/t194 r35.6 InRelease [2,550 B]
Hit:4 https://repo.download.nvidia.com/jetson/ffmpeg r35.6 InRelease
Hit:5 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports focal-updates InRelease
Hit:6 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports focal-backports InRelease
Hit:7 http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports focal-security InRelease
Hit:8 https://esm.ubuntu.com/apps/ubuntu focal-apps-security InRelease
Hit:9 https://esm.ubuntu.com/apps/ubuntu focal-apps-updates InRelease
Hit:10 https://esm.ubuntu.com/infra/ubuntu focal-infra-security InRelease
Hit:11 https://esm.ubuntu.com/infra/ubuntu focal-infra-updates InRelease
Hit:12 https://esm.ubuntu.com/ros/ubuntu focal-security InRelease
Hit:13 http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu focal InRelease
Fetched 5,105 B in 8s (671 B/s)
Reading package lists… Done
Installing ROS
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
E: Unable to locate package ros-melodic-desktop
Installing rosdep
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Package python-rosdep is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package ‘python-rosdep’ has no installation candidate
Initializaing rosdep
sudo: rosdep: command not found
./installROS.sh: line 132: rosdep: command not found
Installing rosinstall tools
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Package python-rosinstall is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
python3-rosinstall
Package python-rosinstall-generator is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
python3-rosinstall-generator
Package python-wstool is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
python3-wstool
E: Package ‘python-rosinstall’ has no installation candidate
E: Package ‘python-rosinstall-generator’ has no installation candidate
E: Package ‘python-wstool’ has no installation candidate
Installation complete!
I believe that ROS Melodic is for version 18.04, ROS Noetic is for 20.04. They don’t have ROS Bionic in the Ubuntu 20.04 repository. You can apt search for ‘noetic’ to make sure it’s there. Thanks for reading!