How To Install ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ROS (Robot Operating System) is an open-source robotics software framework and tool for robotics applications. It helps design complex software without having a good understanding of the hardware. The architecture ROS Noetic supported are amd64, armhf, and arm64.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04.

By default, ROS Noetic is not available on the Ubuntu base repository. Now we add ROS Noetic repository to your system using the following command:

echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu focal main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-focal.list

Next, Add an official ROS keyring:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver 'hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80' --recv-key C1CF6E31E6BADE8868B172B4F42ED6FBAB17C654

Now, update the package list and installs all the software, tools, algorithms, and robot simulators for ROS:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install ros-noetic-desktop-full

After that, set up the environment variables. These variables are necessary in order for ROS to work:

echo "source /opt/ros/noetic/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

You can run roscd command to check if the installation was successful:

roscd

Congratulations! You have successfully installed ROS Noetic. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the ROS Noetic on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official ROS Noetic website.