Install ROS and March

This tutorial will help you install ROS2 Foxy, the MARCH repository, the required buildtools and dependencies. It is recommended to follow this tutorial on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal), other operating systems have not been tested.

Download the MARCH source code

First, make sure both git and git lfs are installed:

sudo apt install git git-lfs

The next step is to download the source code, you can either use ssh (recommended): If you do not have a ssh-key, you can read how to generate one here

cd ~/
git clone git@gitlab.com:project-march/march.git --recurse-submodules
cd march/
git lfs install

Or use https:

cd ~/
git clone https://gitlab.com/project-march/march.git --recurse-submodules
cd march/
git lfs install

Note

It is not necessary to go through the following sections to run the code. You can run everything inside docker images. To see how to set that up see Setting up docker.

Install ROS2 Foxy

To install ROS2, follow: Install ROS2 Foxy.

Install dependencies using rosdep:

source /opt/ros/foxy/local_setup.bash
cd ~/march/ros2
rosdep update
rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro foxy -y

Install Python dependencies

Some additional python dependencies have to be installed using pip:

python3 -m pip install -r ~/march/requirements.txt

Install RealSense dependencies

If you are planning to also use the Intel Realsense camera, you should also install the necessary packages for this: https://github.com/IntelRealSense/librealsense/blob/master/doc/distribution_linux.md#installing-the-packages.