AI & Robotics

Ready to Use Virtualized ROS Groovy

ROS Groovy was released on December the 31st, 2012. For those of you who just want to quickly experiment with it, we provide a ready to use virtual machine. It features ROS Groovy Galapagos installed on Ubunutu 12.04.1 LTS (Precise).

The ROS Groovy virtual machine comes in a single file .ova of approx. 3.3GB. You can launch it using VirtualBox, the very same way as we explained for virtualized ROS Fuerte. The .ova file complies with the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), thus it can be used with other virtualization tools. People reported successful use of the Fuerte’s virtual machine under VmWare and Parallels.

We set Unbuntu to automatically log in the unique admin user:

login: viki
password: viki

It’s a reference to the V.I.K.I character from the I, Robot movie

We first experimented with the latest Ubuntu: version 12.10. But, we decided to roll back to the Ubuntu 12.04. Indeed, with 12.04, the virtual machine is smaller and a bit faster. Besides 12.04 is an LTS version, which means Long-Term Support. The Ubuntu community will be maintaining it for a while. Indeed, LTS versions receive support fir 5 years. For the record, Ubuntu 12.04 was released on April 2012.

Tagged Ros, ROS Groovy Galapagos, ROS Virtual Machine, VirtualBox

This content is brough to you freely under a creative common license. Please donate to help us keep running nootrix.com.

9 Comments

roidFebruary 14, 2013 at 3:45 pmReply

i would recommend everyone install version 4.2.4 of VMWare rather than 4.2.6 (currently the latest). In 4.2.6 i’m finding that 3D acceleration does not seem to work properly with OpenGL in VMWare’s “guest addons”, thus OpenGL things in ROS like Gazebo do not work.
It works if you just disable 3D acceleration and let the CPU do everything, but this is of course very slow.
Tried a lot of stuff to fix it, but downgrading back to version 4.2.4 of VMWare fixed the problem.

Try it yourself by typing each of these lines into new terminal windows or tabs:
roscore
rosrun gazebo gazebo
rosrun gazebo gui
- NooTriXFebruary 14, 2013 at 8:23 pmReplyAuthor
  
  You mean VirtualBox instead of VMWare, isn’t?
NooTriXFebruary 14, 2013 at 10:06 pmReplyAuthor

Daniel reported trouble installing the appliance on windows 7. After some investigation, we figured out that Windows 7 seems to have some issues when it comes to dealing with large files.
Actually, it has a max size, so it stops downloading when this maximum is reached.

You can increase this maximum using a utility provided by Microsoft support at:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/900900
roidFebruary 15, 2013 at 4:37 pmReply

sorry, i meant VirtualBox yes.

I’m also having another problem ontop of this, using Ubuntu’s update manager to update the system is apparently breaking Groovy ROS (but strangely Precice ROS is fine).
After updating, trying to run roscore now responds with “roscore: command not found”.
It does this even if i install the freshly downloaded rosGroovyGalapagos.ova, confirm roscore loads fine, then update, restart etc, confirm roscore won’t load.

I’m able to work around both of these problems for now by using version 4.2.4 of VirtualBox, and not letting the Groovy ROS Ubuntu system’s update manager download updates for anything.

I’m curious if others who are more knowledgeable about Linux and ROS can reproduce my problems.
- NooTriXFebruary 15, 2013 at 4:45 pmReplyAuthor
  
  Yes, with ROS Galapagos the update breaks something with catkin that eventually empties the PATH environment variable. There’s a discussion thread about it on the Virtualizing ROS page. The fix isn’t much complicated. Basically, you need to re-initialize the catkin_workspace.
roidFebruary 25, 2013 at 3:41 pmReply

Sorry, i don’t know howto do that. What are the commands?
- NooTriXMarch 3, 2013 at 11:14 amReplyAuthor
  
  Below is the sequence to recover ROS Galapagos after an update. Step 5 does re-initialize catkin_workspace.
  
  1-Open a new terminal or in an existing one go to your home directory by evaluating:
  cd
  2-Open the .bashrc file using a text editor by evaluating:
  /usr/bin/gedit .bashrc
  3-In the text editor insert a # in the line that causes the bug. It is located at the end of the .bashrc file. The commmented line will become:
  #source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash
  4-save the .bashrc file
  5-reinitilize catkin workspace (Warning: this will delete packages you might have built, so make a backup before) by evaluating in the terminal:
  rm -rf ~/catkin_ws mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src cd ~/catkin_ws/src catkin_init_workspace cd ~/catkin_ws/ catkin_make
  6-In the editor uncomment the line commented in step 3, by removing the #. It will become:
  source ~/catkin_ws/devel/setup.bash
  7-save the .bashrc file and you are done
  
  As a side note, I’d like to mention that sourcing the setup.bash file from catkin_ws (put back in step 6) is just a facility. Its not mentionned in the ROS Groovy installation procedure. But, it is a step that repeats in tutorials.
HOWTO: Getting Started with Arbotix | RadiodreadApril 3, 2013 at 5:47 amReply

[...] Import ROS Groovy Ubuntu appliance http://nootrix.com/2013/01/virtualized-ros-groovy/ [...]
Programming Autonomous Vehicles: A Self-Study Guide | Going AutonomousMay 14, 2013 at 11:04 pmReply

[...] support for ROS is still practically nonexistent, so I’ve installed Nootrix’s ready-to-use ROS+Ubuntu image on VirtualBox to get started. At some point I’ll dual-boot my Mac to speed up the heavy [...]