Environment Setup

It is highly recommended to complete all three RoboND-Perception-Exercises before starting any work on this project..

For the rest of this setup, catkin_ws is the name of active ROS Workspace, if your workspace name is different, change the commands accordingly.

If you do not have an active ROS workspace, you can create one by:

$ mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src
$ cd ~/catkin_ws/
$ catkin_make

Now that you have a workspace, clone or download the project repository into the src directory of your workspace:

$ cd ~/catkin_ws/src
$ git clone https://github.com/udacity/RoboND-Perception-Project.git

Important Note: If you have the Kinematics Pick and Place project in the same ROS Workspace as this project, please remove the gazebo_grasp_plugin directory from this project.

Next install missing dependencies using rosdep install:

$ cd ~/catkin_ws
$ rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro=kinetic -y

Build the project:

$ cd ~/catkin_ws
$ catkin_make

Add the following line to your .bashrc file:

export GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH=~/catkin_ws/src/RoboND-Perception-Project/pr2_robot/models:$GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH

This allows Gazebo to find custom models used in this project.

If you haven’t already, the following line can be added to your .bashrc to auto-source all new terminals:

source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash

You have now successfully built the project and are ready to explore it further!