Simulating large numbers of robots can be a pain. I’ve decided to experiment with building Amazon Machine Instances of ROS to enable me, and anyone else, to quickly launch any number of pre-installed ROS machines and simulate running robots. I’m not sure if this will work, so bear with me…
Steps
- Sign up for Amazon Web Services. There are lots of tutorials on how to do this, it’s pretty easy.
- Run the machine instance for a version of Ubuntu. Canonical makes and packages these.
- sudo apt-get upgrade
- Follow instructions on ROS web site for building and installing ROS.
- Do whatever secondary installation you want on the new node
- TODO: Repackage the instance as a nice clean AMI.
That’s all I have so far, let’s see how this goes!
UPDATE: 2010-03-19
So ROS released their box-turtle release, which provides a package repository for more recent version of Ubuntu! This means that making an AMI with ROS is as simple as using the stock Ubuntu AMI, then adding the ROS repository and adding the box-turtle base packages.