Native ROS Installation

This page installs the MRover codebase and its dependencies for Ubuntu 24.

Caution

If you don’t have Ubuntu 24.04 running natively yet, do that first: Installing Ubuntu.

If you are on a Mac or want to use another Linux distro, see Portable Installation.

Set Up Your SSH Key

To clone our code repository from Github, you need to add SSH keys so that Github can authenticate you. If you just installed Ubuntu, this will not be configured automatically.

Github explains the SSH process here. Make sure to complete the linked prerequisites to generate an SSH key on your machine. Then add the key to your Github account following the instructions on the page. If you’re interested, you can also check out commit signing (linked near the top of that page).

TL;DR:

• complete the “Generating a new SSH key” section detailed here
• run cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub, copy output
• visit here
• click New SSH key
• paste output in

Install

Run:

curl -fsSL https://setup.mrover.org/bootstrap.sh | bash

This clones the repo to ~/ros2_ws/src/mrover-ros2 and runs Ansible to install ROS, our toolchain, and your dev environment (zsh, oh-my-zsh, VSCode, etc).

If you already have the repo cloned, skip bootstrap.sh and run ./setup.sh directly.

Once it finishes, log out and back in (or restart) so your shell picks up the changes, then open a new terminal and run:

mrover
./build.sh

mrover jumps you into the repo and activates the build overlay. You’ll want to run it in every new terminal you use for MRover work. There’s no separate workspace to cd into anymore: the repo you cloned is the workspace.

Sanity Check

Open a new terminal, run mrover, and try:

ros2 launch mrover simulator.launch.py

RViz and the simulator should pop up. The only red errors present should say “Frame [map] does not exist”.

If the simulator’s mouse sensitivity seems too high, edit /etc/gdm3/custom.conf using sudo vim /etc/gdm3/custom.conf, change line 7 from #WaylandEnable=false to WaylandEnable=false, then restart your machine. Ask a lead if you need help using vim.

Keeping Dependencies Up to Date

Our dependencies change over time. If a build starts failing complaining about a missing dependency, or you just want to make sure you’re current, run:

./ansible.sh dev.yml

from inside the repo. This is exactly what setup.sh ran for you the first time.