During his internship at Willow Garage and the Open Source Robotics Foundation, Paul Mathieu from the University of Tokyohas been improving ROS support for ARM platforms with a focused effort on Raspberry Pi. His work makes the installation ROS Groovy a simple task on the pint-sized platform.
Until recently, installing ROS on ARM platforms required building a large quantity of ROS software from source code, a long and tedious task. The lack of easy-to-use cross compilers meant that the software had to be built on the board itself, a time consuming process due to the limited computational power of the Raspberry Pi. Paul's work focused on providing a repository of binary packages for such boards, as well as improvements and extensions to the current build farm's capabilities, allowing for non-x86 binary packages to be easily generated.
The ROS packaging system has been reworked and a new API for the ROS distribution system has been drafted with deep extensibility in-mind. These improvements make building and packaging ROS (and non-ROS) software for PC or embedded targets an easy task, as well as facilitate the replication of build farms.
To install ROS Groovy on Raspberry Pi, please check out the following page here.
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