ROS Framework Installation and Examples

Question

what program do I use to program with the ROS framework, could I potentially use Visual Studio?

I am new to ROS and any tutorials or tutorial programs would be appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

The most common IDE used for ROS development is Eclipse. More information is on the IDEs page on the ROS Wiki: http://www.ros.org/wiki/IDEs

If you follow the ROS tutorials you will see that ROS is merely programming in C or python, and therefore any IDE for these languages will be suitable.

Answer 2

Qt Creator can also be a good choice for C++. It has native support for CMake so there is no need for additional plug-ins or similar stuff. Just open a CMakeLists.txt file, choose a build directory in some place you don't mind (you will be using rosmake after all), run CMake and you're good to go. Autocomplete and refactoring work. Just make sure you run qtcreator from a terminal so it gets the ROS specific environment variables.

Answer 3

QTCreator is a great choice as pgorczak pointed out. If your intention is to use catkin packages instead of ros packages (rosbuild), I recommend you to use QTCreator 2.7.2. This is the newest and last working version I've tested which works with catkin workspaces and packages. New QTCreate versions cause some problems with catkin file system.

I do recommend you start using catkin, since rosbuild won't be supported in the newer versions of ros.

Answer 4

I just want to add a followup here, the most common IDEs for ROS and their respective configurations are in the following ROS IDE wiki page. Also, ROS is a Linux based framework, so no Visual Studio is available. you might use Eclipse (needs pretty good configuration) or QT (I prefer this one, straight forward use and useful for QT GUI creation for ROS packages, if you ever need it !)

Cheers,

Answer 5

I'm using Clion from jetbrains. I dont recommend it if you have no experience with environment setup and all the things with env variables and resources. Most important is to open Clion always with sourced setup file. It can be a bit hard but in my opinion jetbrains ide is worth of it