ansible-role-ros

An Ansible role to set up ROS or ROS 2.

Intro

This role automatically sets up a ROS (2) environment. It automatically detects the Ubuntu distribution and installs the corresponding ROS LTS distribution.

Variables

• ros_version (optional) whether to install ROS or ROS 2. Defaults to '2'.
• ros_variant (optional) Install a ROS variant as defined in REP 131. Defaults to 'ros-base'.

Use

From an Ansible playbook

Install the role from GitHub,

ansible-galaxy install https://github.com/artivis/ansible-role-ros.git

Create an example playbook my-playbook.yml,

---
  - hosts: localhost
    connection: local
    roles: [ansible-role-ros]

and execute it,

ansible-playbook -i localhost my-playbook.yml -e 'ros_version=1'

Through cloud-init

Create a cloud-init configuration file my-cloud-init.yaml,

#cloud-config

# Import SSH key from GitHub
ssh_import_id:
  - gh:my-github-user

# Earlier version of the ansible module
# doesn't install pip automatically.
# Let's avoid any surprise
packages:
  - python3-pip

# We need an Ansible playbook to run.
write_files:
  - content: |
      ---
      - hosts: localhost
        connection: local
        roles: [ansible-role-ros]
    path: /home/ubuntu/ros-playbook.yml
    owner: ubuntu:ubuntu
    permissions: '0444'
    defer: true

# Install Ansible from pip so that we can run it as a given user.
# It also retrieve the Ansible ROS role straight from GitHub.
# Finally execute the playbook created above.
ansible:
  install_method: pip
  package_name: ansible
  run_user: ubuntu

  galaxy:
    actions:
      - ["ansible-galaxy", "install", "https://github.com/artivis/ansible-role-ros.git"]

  setup_controller:
    run_ansible:
      - playbook_dir: /home/ubuntu
        playbook_name: "ros-playbook.yml"
        extra_vars: "'ros_version=1 ros_variant=robot'"

Set up ROS in a Linux container

Launch a Linux container using LXD with the cloud-init configuration,

lxc launch ubuntu:20.04 lxc-ros-noetic --config=user.user-data="$(cat ./my-cloud-init.yaml)"

While we could connect to the freshly spawn container, we better wait for cloud-init to finish,

lxc exec lxc-ros-noetic -- cloud-init status --wait

Set up ROS in an Ubuntu VM

Launch an Ubuntu virtual machine with multipass with the cloud-init configuration,

multipass launch focal -n vm-ros-noetic --cloud-init my-cloud-init.yaml