Dear community,
Anyone has success installing ROS2 on blue OS?
(More generally, I find the promise of the Navigator library super appealing!! My dream is to run ROS2 on the py alongside with ardusub, subscribe to some of the mavlink messages from ros, and have direct control of some of the PWM outputs from ROS. Is that realistic? Are there conflicts to anticipate?)
Thank you!
Hi @g_b,
That’s totally doable. With navigator library you’ll have full hardware access.
To run ROS2, I would recommend taking a look on blueos ros extension and used it as a base to create a ros2 version of it. Contributions with BlueOS-community organization are much welcome 
Hi Patrick,
Thank you for the pointers!
The Dockerfile in the blueos ros extension repo uses arm32v7/ros:noetic-robot but I can’t find a ros2 equivalent.
There’s an ellusive mention of arm32v7/ros:foxy here (which is ROS2), but the tag doesn’t actually exist 
I believe that the same docker also provides ros2 server and tools.
I didn’t manage with that docker. I did manage compiling from source in the end with quite a bit of hand-tweaking. Happy to share findings.
Thank you!
I have been able to successfully use ROS 2 and the BlueROV2 with Blue. Right now it works with Humble, Iron, and Rolling. I have run it both on the Pi (I used a Pi 4) and from a topside computer. It offers support for the features that you mentioned (PWM control for thrusters, receiving mavlink messages, etc). I know of another student group that is also using this project for their research. You might also find the Orca4 project interesting, though it has not been used on hardware.
Hi Evan,
Did you manage to use the ros2 setup on the actual BlueROV2 or in simulation? Which is the software setup to do this? DO you have to flash a ubuntu 22.04 image on rasberry or the proposed blueos image?
@akaraolanis I’ve used it on the actual BlueROV2 and in simulation. Here is another thread that describes the configurations that I used to get things working on hardware. I’ve made an issue in blue!180 to add documentation regarding the setup process that I used so that there is a more formal write-up showing how to setup ROS 2 on the BlueROV.