Packaging ROS for yocto or OpenEmbedded (using bitbake recipes)

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Updated answer:

Lukas has successfully achieved cross-compiling ROS documentation is here: http://wiki.ros.org/hydro/Installation/OpenEmbedded

Previous Answer:

I tried about a year ago to compile barebone ROS diamondback/electric on a Gumstix Overo board running OpenEmbedded Linux. But it failed. I tried every method possible , cross-compiling using oe tools or even native compiling. I even tried to compile apt for oe then use ROS arm repositories, but it failed as well. I also tried using arm emulators like qemu. The only method that I did not try was using eros because of the lack of documentation back then.

I would not recommend any of above methods except eros based cross compiling to start.

For my own project, I cross-compiled a JSON RPC library for oe to export robot functionalities via JSON RPC. That was enough for our project. However, it is easy to wrap a ROS node (not running on the robot) over the RPC client.

Direct Method:

Robot HW:Low Level Drivers:ROS Driver <-- Wifi --> ROS Clients

Indirect Method

Robot HW:Low Level Drivers:Low overhead Server <-- Wifi -->Low overhead client:ROS Driver:ROS Clients