Kick-off) Started playing with ROS Industrial

Welcome to my new blog where I relax and chill with robots, or not even the robots themselves but would be mostly with the software that run those entity. Please don't expect very technically rigid, precise description. I leave those to the official pages or wherever more appropriate. Instead within this blog, I would often talk like chatting, wonder, worry, get mad (??), without paying much attention to the format, but rather my purpose is to write-out-loud my thoughts, how I tackle the problem. And hopefully I achieve cool stuff in robotics eventually.

So if you've reached this page, you know ROS (Robot Operating System) right? I'll be very lazy in this blog to "explain" things in this blog but still try to provide at least links. The loosely intended readers are those who:

• Know ROS (say someone who can write a ROS node that captures certain topics in 15 minutes. That level of maturity, maybe intermediate ROS developers)
• Are interested in manipulation tasks, but not necessarily knowledgeable in the subject (i.e. me)

 Topic-wise, I'm currently thinking of the following, all of which come from either my pure interest or necessity (why necessary will remain untold for now):

• ROS Industrial
• PR2 (personal robot for research)
• Robotics in general (might be independent from ROS) esp. control theory, image processing

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So as a kickoff, I'll start learning ROS Industrial (http://ros.org/wiki/Industrial). First of all install them:

% sudo apt-get install ros-fuerte-industrial

Since ROS Industrial seems consists of huge stacks already, I try starting from sample applications. How about swri_demos (http://ros.org/wiki/swri_demos)?

% cd $YOUR_PATH$
% svn checkout http://swri-ros-pkg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/swri_demos
% rosmake

Then error occurs:

  [rosbuild] Building package armadillo_arm_navigation
  Failed to invoke /opt/ros/fuerte/bin/rospack deps-manifests
armadillo_arm_navigation
  [rospack] Error: package/stack armadillo_arm_navigation depends on
non-existent package motoman

Looks like `motoman` used to be ROS package but now it's promoted to stack, since:

% roscd motoman

brings me to the directory where I find stack.xml. TBC (to be continued).