Revision history [back]

Taken from the wiki

For a package to be considered a catkin package it must meet a few requirements:

The package must contain a catkin compliant package.xml file
That package.xml file provides meta information about the package
The package must contain a CMakeLists.txt which uses catkin
The exception to this rule is that catkin metapackages do not have a CMakeLists.txt file
There can be no more than one package in each folder
This means no nested packages nor multiple packages sharing the same directory

I think you might be missing some files. I had a similar problem once and it was solved through this. Check if you have all these files and follow the following tutorial correctly

http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Tutorials/CreatingPackage

If it still does not work, you might have to change the ROS_PACKAGE_PATH