Installing the Research SDK

Prerequisites

• A developer workstation meeting the minimum system requirements is available for use.
• The developer workstation has been set up successfully with Ubuntu and ROS - instructions here.
• You have configured your Development Workstation to access Github. Instructions here.

Outcome of this step

• You have installed the Rethink RSDK on the Development Workstation.

Installing the Research SDK

1. Download and Install the SDK dependencies

$ sudo apt-get install python-wstool python-rosdep

2. Create a new catkin workspace.

$ mkdir -p ~/ros_ws/src
$ cd ~/ros_ws/src

3. Download and copy the rosinstall file to the root of your Catkin workspace using wstool.

$ wstool init .
$ wstool merge https://raw.github.com/RethinkRobotics/baxter/master/baxter_sdk.rosinstall
$ wstool update
$ cd ..

This pulls down the development branches from all of our repositories into your source directory.

4. Source ros setup if you haven't yet

$ source /opt/ros/groovy/setup.bash

5. Build and Install

$ catkin_make
$ catkin_make install

6. Use the baxter.sh script for proper environment setup

$ cp src/baxter/baxter.sh .

7. Edit the baxter.sh script, modifying the 'baxter_hostname' and 'your_ip' OR 'your_hostname' variables:

# Specify Baxter's hostname
**baxter_hostname="baxter_hostname.local"**

# Set *Either* your computers ip address or hostname. Please note if using
# your_hostname that this must be resolvable to Baxter.
**your_ip="192.168.XXX.XXX"**
#your_hostname="my_computer.local"

Where 'baxter_hostname' is the hostname of your robot and 'your_ip' is the ip address of your development workstation. You may alternatively choose to use the hostname of your development machine but only if baxter can resolve the development machine hostname. Using both ip and hostname is not allowed so pick one method or the other and comment out the other line in the script using the '#' as leading character.

8. Initialize your sdk environment

$ ./baxter.sh

Next Steps

Baxter Research Robot Hardware Installation Guide