It has been an exciting month for the ROS community. We were thrilled to announce that ROS 2 is available on Husky UGV. We now have even more to share with the wider community, as we are pleased to announce that ROS Noetic is available on Husky UGV, Jackal UGV, Dingo, Ridgeback, and Warthog UGV, as well as tutorials for users looking to upgrade from ROS Melodic!
The main difference between ROS Melodic and ROS Noetic is that ROS Noetic targets Ubuntu 20.04/Focal Fossa and by default uses Python 3. This means that ROS developers in ROS Noetic can now take advantage of the Python 3 library’s benefits over the deprecated Python 2 library used in ROS Melodic. Several other default versions have been modified as well:
- Default Python version has been updated from Python 2 (2.7) to Python 3 (3.8)
- Default CMake version has been updated from 3.10.2 to 3.16.3
- Default Gazebo version has been updated from Gazebo 9.0 to Gazebo 11.0
- Default OpenCV version has been updated from 3.2 to 4.2
We can’t wait to see what the community can do with ROS Noetic now that we offer direct support to those who use our robotic platforms. Customers who upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 will be able to use the most recent Linux kernel features and operating system tools. Furthermore, because ROS Noetic is the final ROS 1 distribution to be released, customers who use the ROS Noetic version of their favourite ROS packages can be confident that they will receive the most recent ROS 1 updates and will not need to worry about upgrading to another ROS 1 distribution in the future. The caveat is that developers will eventually need to upgrade from ROS 1 to ROS 2.
You can access our recommended tutorial for ROS Melodic/Ubuntu 18.04 to ROS Noetic/Ubuntu 20.04 migration here.
If you are interested in getting ROS Noetic without upgrading from ROS Melodic, you can use our official ROS Noetic/Ubuntu 20.04 ISO image here.