Getting Started

Note

Instructions are intended for installation on the Ubuntu 20.04 Focal operating system.

Before installing Tesseract and it's dependencies, make sure you have the most up to date packages: ::

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Installing ROS Noetic (Optional)

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open source set of software libraries and tools that help you build robot applications. The tesseract, tesseract_planning, and tesseract_python repositories are all ROS-agnostic. The tesseract_ros and tesseract_ros2 repositories contain tools that are specific to ROS and make integrating Tesseract and ROS extremely easy.

To install the latest version of ROS (Noetic) follow the instructions from the ROS website.

Note

It's easy to miss steps when going through the ROS installation tutorial. If you run into errors in the next few steps, a good place to start is to go back and make sure you have installed ROS correctly.

Installing Tools

Catkin

Catkin is the official build system for ROS. Catkin can also be used to build ROS-agnostic packages containing CMakeLists.txt and package.xml files.

You can install Catkin with the following command:

sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-catkin python3-catkin-tools

ROSDep (Optional)

ROSDep is the official ROS command line tool for installing system dependencies.

You can install ROSDep with the following commands:

sudo apt-get install python3-rosdep
sudo rosdep init
rosdep update

WSTool

WSTool is the official ROS workspace management tool.

You can install WSTool with the following command:

sudo apt-get install python3-wstool

Creating a Workspace

Create a workspace (in this case we'll name it tesseract_ws):

mkdir -p ~/tesseract_ws/src

Cloning Tesseract Repositories

Move to the source directory:

cd ~/tesseract_ws/src

Clone Tesseract repository into your workspace:

git clone https://github.com/tesseract-robotics/tesseract

Clone Tesseract Planning repository into your workspace:

git clone https://github.com/tesseract-robotics/tesseract_planning

Clone Tesseract Qt repository into your workspace:

git clone https://github.com/tesseract-robotics/tesseract_qt

If you are using the Robot Operating System (ROS), you can also clone the Tesseract ROS repository:

git clone https://github.com/tesseract-robotics/tesseract_ros

Installing Dependencies

Cloning Source Dependencies with WSTool

Clone the repositories in the dependencies.rosinstall file using wstool:

wstool init ~/tesseract_ws/src/ ~/tesseract_ws/src/tesseract_planning/dependencies.rosinstall

Installing Debian Dependencies with ROSDep (Optional)

Run the following command to automatically install all debian dependencies listed in each package.xml file:

rosdep install -y --from-paths ~/tesseract_ws/src --ignore-src --rosdistro noetic

Note

If you don't use the ROSDep tool you will need to manually install (via apt-get) each debian dependency.

Building Your Workspace

Build your workspace using catkin tools:

cd ~/tesseract_ws/
source /opt/ros/noetic/setup.bash
catkin build

Source the catkin workspace:

source ~/tesseract_ws/devel/setup.bash

Note

To build with Clang-Tidy enabled you must pass the -DTESSERACT_ENABLE_CLANG_TIDY=ON to cmake when building. This is automatically enabled if cmake argument -DTESSERACT_ENABLE_TESTING_ALL=ON is passed.