Historically ROS has been developed on top of Ubuntu, relying on the distribution as a stable base providing tools (like GCC, CMake, Python to name a few) and libraries (such as Boost, Eigen, PCL) and following its release cycle (a distribution per year, an LTS every two years). This synergy has worked great for more than 15 years and saw the project and the community behind it vastly grow.
However, being tied to a specific Linux distribution raises all kinds of difficulties. Developing for several ROS distributions can be challenging since they each are tied to an Ubuntu distribution. This challenge increases in particular for ROS newcomers that might not even be familiar with Linux. Similarly, developing ROS on Windows or macOS is anything but a pleasant experience.
In this blog post, we will cover how to set up a ROS development environment regardless of the operating system used. Using Multipass, an Ubuntu virtual machines’ manager, it’s easier than ever to quickly…
