| ROS Resources: Documentation | Support | Discussion Forum | Index | Service Status | ros @ Robotics Stack Exchange |
Hi yah all! I am new to this wonderful world of ROS and setting up a small ROS lab to do some experimentation. My question is this, does ROS Indigo Igloo only run on the desktop version of Ubuntu 14.04.1 or can it be set up on both the server installation and the cloud?
ROS Indigo can be installed on any of the various flavors of Ubuntu 14.04 - desktop, server, cloud, etc. (It can also be installed on many other flavors of linux with a little more work!).
The network transport in ROS isn't well-suited for internet-scale deployments, mostly because there are no security features, and there isn't a lot of tolerance to network failures like poor wifi. Most of the large deployments I've seen use ROS on the robot, and sometimes within a building, and then have a bridge to a different protocol over the internet. rosjs has been fairly popular here.
As with any ROS package, I start by looking at the package's wiki page. In this case, it looks like rosjs has been superseded by roslibjs, and they have installation instructions on their wiki page: http://wiki.ros.org/roslibjs .
This is what I have learned so far, ROS is very easy to install! It installs in minutes on an Ubuntu desktop PC and installs just as quickly on an Apache server running on Ubuntu. I did some very preliminary tests on an Apache server and ROS responded correctly. I still have some experimenting to do as far as installing the system on an Ubuntu based cloud but the digging around that I have done points to the fact that this operating system will indeed run in a cloud environment provided that the cloud is setup appropriately. (Since I am a newbie to ROS please correct me if I'm wrong.)
Now what about deploying from an Internet server or cloud? I think that may prove to be a wee bit more challenging as far as a user interface goes, but less challenging than actually building the robot itself. My thoughts are this, imagine jumping from a relatively simple WiFi controlled bot to bots that can be controlled from the other side of the planet relatively inexpensively? From what I am seeing so far, I'm pretty sure that with ROS this can easily be accomplished.
Asked: 2014-09-02 00:07:13 -0500
Seen: 828 times
Last updated: Sep 03 '14
ROS Answers is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 license.
Okay, I decided to get brave and install the full version of ROS on a LAMP server rather than on just a desktop. The install was rather easy and seems to have gone fine. Next, I'm going to throw together a personal cloud and see how that goes. Installed easily on Ubuntu desktop....liking this!