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setup_oceanwaters.md

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These instructions cover the environment setup, installation, and build of OceanWATERS. Familiarity with Unix/Linux and the Bash shell command line is assumed.

If you have not yet done so, install the prerequisites for OceanWATERS.

ROS workspace setup

Installation of OceanWATERS requires creation of a ROS workspace – a directory where you can build multiple, interdependent ROS packages (http://wiki.ros.org/catkin/workspaces). ROS provides custom tools, catkin and wstool, to manage, build, and install ROS packages in a workspace. Catkin is a build system that sits on top of the CMake build system (https://cmake.org) and wstool is a meta–version control system tool that allows you to manage multiple source repositories.

Reading Catkin documentation and going through some of the tutorials is recommended if you've never used catkin.

wstool is quite straightforward and can be picked up easily. Basically, wstool will look at a .rosinstall file that contains the repos to check out or update. You can perform operations like update, diff, and status on multiple repositories at once.

To create a ROS workspace for OceanWATERS first use the setup.bash script provided in the ROS installation to set required ROS environment variables:

source /opt/ros/noetic/setup.bash

Next create a workspace directory for OceanWATERS with a src subdirectory, and go to the src subdirectory:

mkdir -p oceanwaters_ws/src
cd oceanwaters_ws/src

Then checkout the top level OceanWATERS git repository:

git clone https://github.com/nasa/ow_simulator.git

ROS’s wstool will be used to checkout additional repositories containing the source code files making up OceanWATERS. The wstool utility will look for a file, oceanwaters_ws/src/.rosinstall, that contains a list of repositories to check out or update. The OceanWATERS repository contains a number of .rosinstall files for different uses. Create a link to the default repository list:

ln -s ow_simulator/oceanwaters/workspaces/oceanwaters.rosinstall .rosinstall

Now use wstool to checkout/update the source code:

wstool update

NOTE: At this point you will have cloned the master branch of all OceanWATERS repositories. master branch is a stable snapshot of noetic-devel branch, both compatible with ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04.

OceanWATERS Build

To build the workspace, cd back up to the workspace directory and run catkin build.

cd ..
catkin build

The first build of OceanWATERS will take an extra long time as the build process downloads around 2 GB of 3rd party code and data. The code and data will be cached in the src/ tree, so subsequent builds should be much faster.

Finally set OceanWATERS specific environment variables using the provided script:

source oceanwaters_ws/devel/setup.bash

At this point you should see Gazebo related variables such as GAZEBO_MODEL_PATH set in your environment.

Launch the simulator to make sure that the build was successful:

roslaunch ow europa_terminator_workspace.launch

Many windows will appear, as well as many messages in the terminal (including some warnings and errors) which at this time are expected. But when startup finishes, you should see the RViz window showing a 3D model of the lander, and the Gazebo window also showing the terrain.

Congratulations, your OceanWATERS installation and setup is complete!