Installing Husky Software

Note

The physical Husky robot comes pre-configured with ROS2 and the necessary Husky packages already installed; therefore, you will only need to follow the instructions below if re-installing software on the Husky.

Note

If you wish to install the Husky packages on your computer (e.g. to interface with the physical Husky robot and/or to simulate Husky), then proceed with the following instructions below. A prequisite is to make sure you have a working ROS2 Foxy installation set up on your computer.

Add Clearpath Debian Package Repository

Before you can install the Husky packages, you need to configure Ubuntu’s APT package manager to add Clearpath’s package server:

  1. Install the authentication key for the packages.clearpathrobotics.com repository. In terminal, run:

wget https://packages.clearpathrobotics.com/public.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -

  1. Add the debian sources for the repository. In terminal, run:

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb https://packages.clearpathrobotics.com/stable/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/clearpath-latest.list'

  1. Update your computer’s package cache. In terminal, run:

sudo apt-get update

Installing from Debian Packages

The preferred way to install Husky’s packages is using precompiled Debian packages. These packages are available for Ubuntu 20.04.

After your computer is configured to use Clearpath’s debian package repository, you can install the Husky packages needed for this tutorial. In terminal, run:

sudo apt-get install ros-foxy-husky-desktop ros-foxy-husky-simulator

The husky_robot package only needs to be installed on the physical Husky robot; however, you can optionally install it on your computer too. In terminal, run:

sudo apt-get install ros-foxy-husky-robot

Installing from Source

Husky packages are available on GitHub, and can be compiled and installed from source if desired:

  1. Create a workspace directory. In terminal, run:

mkdir -p ~/husky_ws/src

  1. Clone the Husky repositories into your workspace directory. In terminal, run:

cd ~/husky_ws/src
git clone -b foxy-devel https://github.com/husky/husky.git
cd ..

  1. Install additional dependencies. In terminal, run:

rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro=$ROS_DISTRO -y

  1. Build the workspace. In terminal, run:

colcon build

  1. You can now source your workspace to make use of the packages you just built. In terminal, run:

source install/setup.bash

  1. If you would like ROS to run on boot run:

ros2 run husky_bringup install