Installing ROS or ROS2 locally on BlueROV2

Hi everyone,

My team and I have been struggling for the past week on how to install ROS or ROS 2 locally on the Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB RAM, 64-bit) of our BlueROV2 Heavy. We currently have the standard Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit bullseye on the Pi. We would like to install ROS or ROS2 locally, but it looks like we have 2 choices:

  1. For ROS, we would have to downgrade the OS to buster, as bullseye is not supported with ROS noetic.
  2. For ROS 2, we would have to install Ubuntu 22.04 as suggested here.

We will have to install ROS extensions for some additional sensors that we are using and we will do sensor fusion.

Has anyone had the same experience and can share some insights on how to proceed?

Hi Susanna -
Have you considered using BlueOS, and installing the ROS extension?
If you’re intending to use ROS with the BlueROV2, this may be your best option…

Hi Tony,
We are already using BlueOS and I tried out the ROS extension, but we wanted to avoid using docker images as no one in my team has experience with them. Also, we would prefer to use ROS2 since our laptops mainly run on newer versions of Linux, which are not compatible with ROS. Right now we are trying to install blueOS on a newly flashed card with Ubuntu 22.04, and later install ROS2 with the extensions of the sensors.

Hi @susanna -
Docker images are a very ubiquitous form of packaging software, I would encourage your team to get familiar with them! I’m not sure you’ll have an easy time getting ROS2 to coexist with BlueOS - this is likely much more challenging than the typical ROS extension approach. You can install the ROS extension in BlueOS with just a couple clicks in the Extensions Manager… best of luck!