ROS (Robot Operating System)#

Official Website

Description#

ROS (Robot Operating System) is an open-source meta-operating system for robots. While not a traditional operating system, ROS provides services you would expect from an OS including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management.

ROS is widely used in robotics research and development, and is particularly popular on ARM-based Single Board Computers due to their small form factor, low power consumption, and sufficient computing power for robotic applications.

ROS Versions#

ROS 2 (Recommended)#

ROS 2 is the current actively developed version with significant improvements over ROS 1:

Key improvements in ROS 2:

• Real-time capabilities
• Multi-robot systems support
• Improved security
• DDS-based communication
• Better embedded systems support
• Native support for ARM architectures

ROS 1 (Legacy)#

**Note:** ROS 1 Noetic reached End of Life in May 2025. New projects should use ROS 2.

Installation on SBCs#

Prerequisites#

• Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 (recommended for ROS 2)
• At least 2GB RAM (4GB+ recommended)
• 16GB+ storage space
• ARM64 (aarch64) architecture

Installing ROS 2 Jazzy on Ubuntu 24.04#

# Set locale
sudo apt update && sudo apt install locales
sudo locale-gen en_US en_US.UTF-8
sudo update-locale LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

# Setup sources
sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository universe
sudo apt update && sudo apt install curl -y
sudo curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/ros.key -o /usr/share/keyrings/ros-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/ros-archive-keyring.gpg] http://packages.ros.org/ros2/ubuntu $(. /etc/os-release && echo $UBUNTU_CODENAME) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros2.list > /dev/null

# Install ROS 2
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ros-jazzy-desktop  # Full desktop install
# OR
sudo apt install ros-jazzy-ros-base  # Minimal install (recommended for SBCs)

# Source the setup script
echo "source /opt/ros/jazzy/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Common ROS Packages for SBCs#

Performance Tips for SBCs#

1. Use ros-base instead of desktop - Saves storage and RAM by excluding visualization tools
2. Enable swap - ROS compilation can be memory-intensive
3. Use SSD storage - Faster compilation and package installation
4. Cross-compile for production - Build on a more powerful machine, deploy to SBC
5. Use Docker - Pre-built ROS containers are available for ARM64

Docker Installation (Alternative)#

# Install Docker
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com -o get-docker.sh
sudo sh get-docker.sh
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

# Run ROS 2 Jazzy container
docker run -it --rm ros:jazzy-ros-base

Related Resources#

• ROS 2 Documentation
• ROS Discourse Community
• ROS Answers
• ROS on Raspberry Pi

Supported Boards#

ROS 2 officially supports ARM64 (aarch64) architecture and runs on most SBCs with Ubuntu support. Which can be achieved via Canonical Ubuntu Certified hardware or via Armbian.