Robotics: Install ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04 for Autonomous Driving Applications

A quick guide to installing and using ROS

A robotic dog: image generated by the Midjourney community through an AI tool

This article explains how to install ROS and some essential packages that can be helped in writing some control applications for autonomous driving or other autonomous navigation. This article will be followed by another article explaining how to use the CAT Vehicle ROS package to develop control applications for ground autonomous car-like agents.

Requirements

The tutorial uses Ubuntu 20.04 which is the last Ubuntu version supported by ROS 1. As a ROS version is tied to a particular Ubuntu version, we will be using ROS Noetic which is probably the last ROS 1 version as well.

I expect the user to have a computer with Ubuntu 20.04 installed.

Instruction for the installation

Open a terminal window and type the following:

1. Setting up sources.list to accept packages from ROS repo:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

2. Setting up keys:

sudo apt install curl # if you haven't already installed curl