Python 3 On ROS MELODIC - COMPLETE - untested by me

full_python3_melodic.md

Steepest Descent

Musings on Robotics, Machine Learning, AI, and other stuff

Building ROS Melodic with Python3 support

Miguel Alonso Jr Follow

Computer Science Faculty at FIU

20 Aug 2019

To kick off my new blog, I thought that I’d tackle an issue that’s been bugging me for a few months now: how the hell do I

get python3 support in ROS Melodic! In this article, I will go through the steps required to build ROS Melodic from source

with full python 3 support. Future posts will discuss how to integrate this new build with pycharm, as well as, how a simple

demo example to test the python3 integration. So, without further delay, here we go!

Caveats

This tutorial assumes a few things:

You are familiar with ROS

You would like to run ROS Melodic in Ubuntu Linux 18.04 with Python3 support

You are familiar with the ROS build system

Familiar with the Linux command line, a shell like bash, and an editor like vim

System setup

First things first, we need to setup our build environment properly. As mentioned above, we will be using Ubuntu 18.04 LTS,

so, we will simply refer to the OS as Ubuntu.

Remove all things python2 (Optional)

This step is optional, but I recommend it to have a clean build. Any other system packages that are removed can be

reinstalled later by following the instructions here. So, to remove all python2 packages, execute the following on the

command line:

$ sudo apt-get remove python- *

Remove any previous installations of ROS

It’s probably a good idea to remove any previous versions of ROS. So, for example, to remove a default melodic install,

execute the following in a shell:

$ sudo apt-get remove ros- *
$ sudo apt-get remove ros-melodic- *
$ sudo apt-get autoremove

Setup Python3 dependencies

Since we will be building ROS Melodic from source to support python3, we need to install several dependencies.

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install -y python3 python3-dev python3-pip build-essential

We’ll also need to install ROS specific packages using pip3:

$ sudo -H pip3 install rosdep rospkg rosinstall_generator rosinstall wstool vcstools catkin_tools catkin_pkg

Initialize catkin build environment

As with any standard ROS installation, we need to initialize rosdep:

$ sudo rosdep init
$ rosdep update

and create the catkin workspace that we will use to build ROS. Please be sure of the location of the workspace, since the

entire build will be tied to that location. If the workspace folder is deleted or moves, it will corrupt the installation.

$ cd ~
$ mkdir ros_catkin_ws
$ cd ros_catkin_ws

Next, we have to initialize the catkin workspace. If you’re unfamiliar with the catkin build tools, you can check out the docs

here. Note: This initialization will build the release version of ROS Melodic and install it to a directory called “install” that is

located within the ros_catkin_ws directory.

$ catkin config --init -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE = Release --blacklist rqt_rviz rviz_plugin_tutorials librviz_tutorial
--install

Setup ROS install

ROS has many different flavors of installations: desktop, desktop-full, ros_core, robot, etc. For development purposes, I

would recommend installing desktop-full, but feel free to install the flavor that meets your needs. Simply replace desktop-full

with the installation flavor of your choice, e.g. ros_base. You can read more about the various options here.

$ rosinstall_generator desktop_full --rosdistro melodic --deps --tar > melodic-desktop-full.rosinstall
$ wstool init -j8 src melodic-desktop-full.rosinstall

If a download fails, just re-run the following command until all packages download properly:

$ wstool update -j4 -t src

Setup environment and install dependencies

Here is where things start to diverge a bit from the default build from source procedure. First, we need to have an

environment variable called ROS_PYTHON_VERSION set to 3:

$ export ROS_PYTHON_VERSION = 3

We need to install wxPython for the build to complete.

$ pip3 install -U -f https://extras.wxpython.org/wxPython4/extras/linux/gtk3/ubuntu-18.04 wxPython

We will also need to create a shell script called install_skip with the following:

#!/bin/bash
#Check whether root
if [ $(whoami) != root ] ; then
echo You must be root or use sudo to install packages.
return
fi

#Call apt-get for each package
for pkg in "$@"
do
echo "Installing $pkg"
sudo apt-get -my install $pkg >> install.log
done

and make the script executable:

$ chmod +x install_skip

And now for a little SED magic!

We need to install all of the dependencies for the ROS source, but for python3 instead of python3. That means that we

need to see what the ROS packages need and install the python3 version instead of the python2 version. We can do that

with the following:

$ sudo ./install_skip `rosdep check --from-paths src --ignore-src | grep python | sed -e "s/^apt\t//g" | sed
-z "s/\n/ /g" | sed -e "s/python/python3/g"`

We’ll now install all of the remaining dependencies using rosdep and skip the python2 based dependencies:

$ rosdep install --from-paths src --ignore-src -y --skip-keys = "`rosdep check --from-paths src --ignore-src |
grep python | sed -e "s/^apt\t//g" | sed -z "s/\n/ /g"`"

The final step before building is replacing all references to python2 in the shebangs to python3:

$ find. -type f -exec sed -i 's/\/usr\/bin\/env[ ]*python/\/usr\/bin\/env python3/g' {} +

Be sure to only run this once. If you run this twice by mistake, you might end up with shebangs that have python33 instead

of python3.

Finally, build ROS!

With all the setup out of the way, we’re ready to build ROS Melodic with python3 support:

$ catkin build

And that’s it! Once the build finishes, you will have a ROS Melodic build that supports python3. The last step is to export the

PYTHON_PATH environment variable to let ROS know where all of the system python3 packages are installed.

$ export PYTHONPATH = /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages

You should do this prior to sourcing the setup in the devel directory:

$ source ~/ros_catkin_ws/install/setup.bash

to be able to access ROS via the command line (assuming that you are running bash).

In summary, assuming that you are familiar with Ubuntu, the command line, and the ROS build system, I showed you how

to build ROS Melodic with python3 support. Next post, I’ll be discussing how to setup pycharm with our python3 ROS

Melodic build, along with a simple example to test the installation. Until next time!

Update

I’ve added the code snippets to a gist here to make bug tracking a bit easier.

20 Aug 2019

python3 robotics ros

Machine Learning with JAX: Linear Regression »