Software Installation for Hardware¶

This guide is meant for users preparing to conduct hardware flight experiments, not just simulation. For the simulation guide, see Software Installation for Sim. Note that these two installation guides have minor differences.

The first step to get started with ROSflight will be to set up and install the necessary dependencies and software. On hardware, we need to set up two devices: the companion computer and the flight controller. For more information on the difference between these two devices, see the overview page.

Starting in sim

If you haven't done so yet, we recommend setting up the simulation environment first before getting started with hardware. The simulation environment makes it easier to get familiar with the ROSflight ecosystem without needing to debug any potential hardware issues.

Overview¶

We will need to install these packages on the companion computer:

ROS2
ROSflightIO
ROScopter
ROSplane

We will install just the firmware on the flight controller.

Note

You probably don't need both ROSplane and ROScopter. If that is the case, just install the one that makes sense for your application.

Installing ROS2¶

Unsuprisingly, ROS2 is a required dependency for ROSflight. You can do this with a native installation of ROS2 or by following the ROSflight Docker guide. To install ROS2 natively, check out the official ROS2 Installation page for details.

If you don't plan to run simulations or GUI applications on your companion computer, ros-<ros-distro>-ros-base can be used instead of ros-<ros-distro>-desktop.

Note

ROSflight currently officially supports only LTS versions of ROS2, so ROS2 Humble running on Ubuntu 22.04 or ROS2 Jazzy running on Ubuntu 24.04. If you want to run a different version of ROS2, some of the below instructions may not work. ROS2 Rolling is not fixed-release and is therefore not officially supported.

Companion Computer Setup¶

Do the following on your companion computer.

Create your ROSflight workspace:
```
mkdir -p ~/rosflight_ws/src
```

Clone the rosflight_ros_pkgs repository, as well as roscopter and rosplane:

cd ~/rosflight_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/rosflight/rosflight_ros_pkgs --recursive
git clone https://github.com/rosflight/roscopter
git clone https://github.com/rosflight/rosplane

File structure

Your ROSflight workspace file structure should now look like

rosflight_ws/
  └── src/
      ├── roscopter/
      ├── rosflight_ros_pkgs/
      └── rosplane/

Install dependencies using rosdep:
Warning

Make sure you have properly sourced the ROS2 environment in the terminal you are working in, or the rosdep and colcon commands will fail.
```
# Replace <ros-distro> with your ROS2 distro (probably 'humble' or 'jazzy')
source /opt/ros/<ros-distro>/setup.bash
```
Tip

If you are not planning on using the simulation environment on your companion computer, you can delete the rosflight_sim package safely. This will speed up build times.
```
cd ~/rosflight_ws/src/rosflight_ros_pkgs
rm -rf rosflight_sim
```
```
cd ~/rosflight_ws
sudo rosdep init
rosdep update
rosdep install --from-path . -y --ignore-src
```
If you have already done sudo rosdep init previously, it will return an error. In most cases, you do not need to reinitialize.

Build using the colcon build tool:

cd ~/rosflight_ws
colcon build

After the build, you should see output similar to:

---
Finished <<< roscopter [1min 34s]
Starting >>> rosflight_pkgs
Finished <<< rosflight_pkgs [0.42s]                        

Summary: 18 packages finished [1min 44s]
4 packages had stderr output: roscopter rosflight_io rosplane rosplane_extra

There may be warnings or stderr output, but as long as each package says Finished, the build was successful.

Resource Usage

Building the whole repository at once uses a lot of memory. If you get build errors, try running the build command with the following argument:

colcon build --executor sequential

Success

The colcon build tool will create build, log, and install folders, even if the build fails. Your ROSflight workspace file structure should now look like

rosflight_ws/
  ├── build/
  ├── install/
  ├── log/
  └── src/
      ├── roscopter/
      ├── rosflight_ros_pkgs/
      └── rosplane/

Add the source files to your .bashrc (so you don't have to source the files every time you open a terminal):
```
# add the sourcing commands to your .bashrc. Replace bash with zsh if using zsh.
echo "source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash" >> $HOME/.bashrc
echo "source $HOME/rosflight_ws/install/setup.bash" >> $HOME/.bashrc

source $HOME/.bashrc
```
If you are using a different ROS 2 distribution, replace humble with your distro name.

Make sure to reopen current terminals after adding these commands to your .bashrc file (or run source $HOME/.bashrc file in every open terminal).

Flight controller setup¶

ROS2 will not be installed on the flight controller unit (FCU). We will only need to build and flash the FCU with the rosflight_firmware.

See the flight controller guide for instructions on how to do this.

Next Steps¶

At this point, you have successfully installed ROS2 and set up ROSflight on the companion computer, including all required dependencies.

For guidance on running simulations, see the tutorials.