ROS logoSnowbots users ROS as the software platform for our robots. Since deciding to experiment with Gumstix to build smaller, nicer looking vehicles we have been looking for a way to run ROS on it so we do not have to modify any of our other code to make our robot work.

After figuring out how to install Ubuntu 10.04 on the Gumstix Overo, installing ROS became trivial. Ubuntu has all the required dependencies for ROS so all that was required was to compile ROS. Following the ROS Installing On Ubuntu from SVN instructions located here worked perfectly. This solution does work perfectly but it does require compiling the code natively which can be quite slow. It took nearly 2 hours to compile ROS itself. I was also able to get add-ons like OpenCV to work correctly as well, but compiling code for it was extremely slow. I have yet to performance testing

Now that ROS is installed, the only thing remaining to drive our robots with a Gumstix is to interface our hardware with the Gumstix.

Videos to come when we get everything working