How to auto deploy a robot?

edit

In my case, I have a robot which automatically launches everything it needs for a basic behavior. Like Delb said in his answer, I have a launch file that will run all the nodes I need. Then, I launch that file from my .bashrc in one of the tty terminals.

In the launch file you can either define your nodes, or include other launch files that would start the nodes.

For the startup running of the launch file, here's the code I have on my .bashrc file:

TERMINAL = `tty`
case $TERMINAL in
       "/dev/tty2") roslaunch your_master_file.launch;
       sleep 2;;
esac

I chose tty2 but you can launch wherever you want. That would launch your file everytime you boot up your robot computer.

I use a way more simpler approach:

I just launch a screen with my commands on startup. For that I put my launch commands in a screen configuration file, e.g. ~/.screen-startup:

screen 0 zsh -is eval 'roscore'
screen 1 zsh -is eval 'roslaunch --wait wild_thumper wild_thumper.launch'
screen 2 zsh -is eval 'roslaunch (...)

and run that on start with cron:

@reboot screen -d -m -c ~/.screen-startup

Its easy to setup, and that way I keep full control of each launch file since each is running in its own screen window.

robot_upstart is a popular ROS package dedicated for registering and de-registering Ubuntu upstart job.