Portable ROS Installation (Unofficial)

Supported Platforms

The portable environment is built on pixi and currently supports:

Subteam	Non-Ubuntu24 Linux	Mac
Navigation	Supported	Supported
Perception	Mostly Supported*	Mostly Supported**
Localization	Supported	Supported
ESW	Supported	Mostly Supported***
Teleop	Supported	Supported
Drone	Supported	Supported

*Zed SDK is only available for Ubuntu

**CUDA is not available on Mac

***The main mrover-esw is supported on mac, but mrover-ros2 will not build the ESW module on mac

For Windows, please install Ubuntu 24 directly. WSL2 will NOT work.

For members with Snapdragon laptops, we recommend getting a loaner from the University here.

Set Up Your SSH Key

To clone our code repository from GitHub, you need to add SSH keys so that Github can authenticate you.

Github explains the SSH process here.

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://raw.githubusercontent.com/umrover/mrover-ros2/skj/portable/bootstrap-portable.sh | bash

This clones the repo to ~/ros2_ws/src/mrover-ros2, installs relevant packages and libraries, then runs Ansible and sets up your environment using Pixi.

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

You’ll also need an SSH key set up with Github to clone. See Github’s guide if you haven’t done that yet.

Once it finishes, log out and back in (or reboot), open a new terminal, and run:

mrover
./build.sh

mrover jumps you into the repo and activates your environment, except here that environment is the pixi shell, not your system Python/ROS install.

Sanity Check

Open a new terminal, run mrover, and run:

ros2 launch mrover simulator.launch.py

If the simulator launches, you have successfully set up the codebase and ROS environment.

Keeping Dependencies Up to Date

Run the dev-portable playbook:

./ansible.sh dev-portable.yml