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It's not exactly encouraging to see, on the Willow Garage ROS website, that the page seems to have been last updated in 2013 (http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/

It's not exactly encouraging to see, on the Willow Garage ROS website, that the page seems to have been last updated in 2013 (http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/software/ros-platform http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/software/ros-platform). You'll instead want to try http://www.ros.org/ http://www.ros.org/ or go directly to the installers, located at: http://wiki.ros.org/lunar/Installation http://wiki.ros.org/lunar/Installation However, the latest version (Lunar) on OSX is described "This is a work in progress! It really won't work right now... " and I've verified their instructions don't work. Instead, you'll want to use this shim: https://github.com/mikepurvis/ros-install-osx https://github.com/mikepurvis/ros-install-osx Hope this saves some folks time.

ModernMech 9y ago
Willow Garage is defunct. They closed doors in early 2014. This point is not really made on their website. What's more troubling to me is I've been hearing about ROS 2.0 since 2014, and no progress (at least outwardly) has been made.
- ragebol 9y ago
  ROS 2.0 is under active development, with many talks on it last ROSCon. You can follow it at https://github.com/ros2 https://github.com/ros2 and https://discourse.ros.org/c/ng-ros https://discourse.ros.org/c/ng-ros It's going for a Beta release this December 8 [0] Some of the main goals of ROS 2.0 are support for QoS and (small) embedded devices, Windows support [0] https://github.com/ros2/ros2/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/ros2/ros2/wiki/Roadmap
  - ausjke 9y ago
    ROS probably should go under Linux Foundation as well.
- dbcurtis 9y ago
  ROS 2.0 is rebuilding a lot of infrastructure. Plenty of development is happening; the github repos as I type this show a lot of repo updates that are minutes to days old. That said, the current state of ROS 2.0 is probably well described as "developer only". Current ROS-based commercial robots are still on ROS 1, Kinetic or even Indigo.
  - ModernMech 9y ago
    That's good to know. I guess if you're in the ROS community this stuff is apparent, but on the periphery it's not clear that ROS 2 is even a thing judging by the ROS website. I just thought in 3 years, I would have seen it mentioned more prominently on the ros.org domain, so I concluded it was stalled.
  - ragebol 9y ago
    Luckily, lot's of commercial parties seem very interested in ROS 2.0 which gives me some good hopes for a less painful transition from ROS 1 to 2 than from Python 2 to 3... But given the federated development of many non-OSRF maintained packages, the bridge between ROS 1 and 2 is going to be used for a long time, I'm afraid. But it's possible at least to mix the versions.
dekhn 9y ago
The Willow Garage page is dead because the company went out of business. Trying to run ROS on anything but Linux is a waste of time.
- ModernMech 9y ago
  It works well under Windows via the Linux Subsystem, at least the transport layer (which is what most people I've talked to use it for anyway.)
  - dekhn 9y ago
    Ah, OK. I checked, and while transport is fine, it didn't seem to support cameras or other hardware. I'd prefer it to be Windows-native, rather than WSL.
  - accurrent 9y ago
    I've had weird bugs with ROS on WSL. RosPy works, ROS CPP however seems to fail to subscribe.
- Waterluvian 9y ago
  I run it on my Mac at work all day. It's not a waste of time but you really do need to commit to the maintenance. Mike Purvis' shim listed in a comment above helps a lot.
dbcurtis 9y ago
Yes, well, a version of ROS has always been tightly paired with single version of Ubuntu, for better or worse. There is only so much bandwidth to support so much. These days, Kinetic (the current LTS) and Lunar are pretty portable to many Linux distros, but anything else is probably an exercise for the intrepid, although ros.org will happily take patches. But if you are just starting out learning ROS, then my advice is to hew as closely as possible to the documented/supported configurations. There is enough other stuff to learn to keep you busy without fighting other subtleties.
- Animats 9y ago
  Even on the correct version of Ubuntu, there always seems to be some version clash / version pinning problem which breaks the Ubuntu updater. ROS itself is three things - some message-passing middleware, the Gazebo world simulator, and a distro of various robotics-related packages from others. The distro part consists of software from maybe a hundred different sources, more or less duct-taped together. Some of the packages in that distro work better than others.
  - joshvm 9y ago
    A good way around this is to run ROS exclusively from Docker containers. With the right permissions set up, it works fine with USB devices too. https://hub.docker.com/_/ros/ https://hub.docker.com/_/ros/

ModernMech 9y ago

Willow Garage is defunct. They closed doors in early 2014. This point is not really made on their website. What's more troubling to me is I've been hearing about ROS 2.0 since 2014, and no progress (at least outwardly) has been made.

ragebol 9y ago
ROS 2.0 is under active development, with many talks on it last ROSCon. You can follow it at https://github.com/ros2 https://github.com/ros2 and https://discourse.ros.org/c/ng-ros https://discourse.ros.org/c/ng-ros It's going for a Beta release this December 8 [0] Some of the main goals of ROS 2.0 are support for QoS and (small) embedded devices, Windows support [0] https://github.com/ros2/ros2/wiki/Roadmap https://github.com/ros2/ros2/wiki/Roadmap
- ausjke 9y ago
  ROS probably should go under Linux Foundation as well.
dbcurtis 9y ago
ROS 2.0 is rebuilding a lot of infrastructure. Plenty of development is happening; the github repos as I type this show a lot of repo updates that are minutes to days old. That said, the current state of ROS 2.0 is probably well described as "developer only". Current ROS-based commercial robots are still on ROS 1, Kinetic or even Indigo.
- ModernMech 9y ago
  That's good to know. I guess if you're in the ROS community this stuff is apparent, but on the periphery it's not clear that ROS 2 is even a thing judging by the ROS website. I just thought in 3 years, I would have seen it mentioned more prominently on the ros.org domain, so I concluded it was stalled.
- ragebol 9y ago
  Luckily, lot's of commercial parties seem very interested in ROS 2.0 which gives me some good hopes for a less painful transition from ROS 1 to 2 than from Python 2 to 3... But given the federated development of many non-OSRF maintained packages, the bridge between ROS 1 and 2 is going to be used for a long time, I'm afraid. But it's possible at least to mix the versions.

dekhn 9y ago

The Willow Garage page is dead because the company went out of business. Trying to run ROS on anything but Linux is a waste of time.

ModernMech 9y ago
It works well under Windows via the Linux Subsystem, at least the transport layer (which is what most people I've talked to use it for anyway.)
- dekhn 9y ago
  Ah, OK. I checked, and while transport is fine, it didn't seem to support cameras or other hardware. I'd prefer it to be Windows-native, rather than WSL.
- accurrent 9y ago
  I've had weird bugs with ROS on WSL. RosPy works, ROS CPP however seems to fail to subscribe.
Waterluvian 9y ago
I run it on my Mac at work all day. It's not a waste of time but you really do need to commit to the maintenance. Mike Purvis' shim listed in a comment above helps a lot.

dbcurtis 9y ago

Yes, well, a version of ROS has always been tightly paired with single version of Ubuntu, for better or worse. There is only so much bandwidth to support so much. These days, Kinetic (the current LTS) and Lunar are pretty portable to many Linux distros, but anything else is probably an exercise for the intrepid, although ros.org will happily take patches. But if you are just starting out learning ROS, then my advice is to hew as closely as possible to the documented/supported configurations. There is enough other stuff to learn to keep you busy without fighting other subtleties.

Animats 9y ago
Even on the correct version of Ubuntu, there always seems to be some version clash / version pinning problem which breaks the Ubuntu updater. ROS itself is three things - some message-passing middleware, the Gazebo world simulator, and a distro of various robotics-related packages from others. The distro part consists of software from maybe a hundred different sources, more or less duct-taped together. Some of the packages in that distro work better than others.
- joshvm 9y ago
  A good way around this is to run ROS exclusively from Docker containers. With the right permissions set up, it works fine with USB devices too. https://hub.docker.com/_/ros/ https://hub.docker.com/_/ros/