Installing ROS on Radxa Rock

Radxa Rock is a quad core ARM computer based on the Rockchip RK3188 cpu. It has 80 2.54mm extension header, making it a good hardware for Robotic applications.

The steps below allows you to install ROS Hydro on radxa rock quite easily. This could only be done with the help of the ROS "Ubuntu ARM" binaries infrastructure already put in place by Austin Hendrix http://wiki.ros.org/hydro/Installation/UbuntuARM .

Please note that this is still experimental an install, report any bugs or issues you encounter.

Install the release image

Radxa has provided Ubuntu based images to install on the internal NAND flash. We will install it as a base system and install ROS on it.

Requirements

• Radxa Rock board
• Micro usb OTG cable
• Linux desktop

• Tools download from http://dl.radxa.com/rock/tools/linux/Linux_Upgrade_Tool_v1.16.zip

• Image download from http://dl.radxa.com/rock/images/ubuntu/radxa_rock_ubuntu_server_140315_update.zip

Steps

• Unzip the Linux_Upgrade_Tool_v1.16.zip and the radxa_rock_ubuntu_server_140315_update.zip. Remove all the power on RR, press and hold the recovery key, plug in the OTG cable to RR and the PC, run

sudo upgrade_tool uf radxa_rock_ubuntu_server_140315_update.img 
Loading firmware...
Support Type:RK31       FW Ver:1.0.00   FW Time:2014-03-15 11:53:56
Loader ver:2.08 Loader Time:2013-12-02 18:58:57
Upgrade firmware ok.

Now you have the basic Ubuntu server installed on RR. Power on the RR and SSH to it or log in via the serial console. The default password for user root is root.

Install ROS

Setup the ROS source list

• sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.namniart.com/repos/ros raring main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

Set up your keys

• wget http://packages.namniart.com/repos/namniart.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -

Installation

First, make sure your Debian package index is up-to-date:

• sudo apt-get update

There are many different libraries and tools in ROS. Most of the default configurations do not yet compile fully on ARM. You can also install ROS packages individually.

• ROS-Base: (Bare Bones) ROS package, build, and communication libraries. No GUI tools.

  • sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-ros-base

  Individual Package: You can install a specific ROS package (replace underscores with dashes of the package name):

  • sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-PACKAGE

    • e.g.

    sudo apt-get install ros-hydro-slam-gmapping

To find available packages, use:

apt-cache search ros-hydro