Hi Anne,
This is really cool, thanks for putting the effort into writing these instructions! 
They’re well written and cover many of the potential pitfalls during the installation process, which will no doubt be useful to anyone trying to follow them 
Given many of the challenges you faced were with Jessie being old and no longer supported, I’m curious how much simpler the steps would be to run on BlueOS Beta. Perhaps an ROS service integration is a decent idea for one of our initial Extensions…