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Creating your Team's Package

You should use the same procedures as you did in the Simulation Labs to create a ROS package for this assignment (described again below). You should create one package per team, so nominate one member of your team to do this bit now.

You should do this from within your own local ROS installation (i.e. on your own computer), or a WSL-ROS2 terminal instance.

  1. First, make sure you have the tuos_ros Course Repo installed, and if you've already installed it previously then make sure it's up-to-date.

  2. Head to the src folder of your ROS2 workspace in your terminal and into the tuos_ros Course Repo from there:

    cd ~/ros2_ws/src/tuos_ros/

  3. Use the create_pkg.sh helper script to create your team's ROS package (pay attention to the further information below about the naming of your package).

    ./create_pkg.sh acs6121_teamXX_2025

    Your package must be named as follows:

    acs6121_teamXX_2025

    ... where XX should be replaced with your team number (see Blackboard if you are unsure what your team's number is).

    If your team number is less than 10: put a zero before it, so that the team number is always 2 digits long, e.g.:

    • acs6121_team03_2025 for Team 3
    • acs6121_team08_2025 for Team 8
    • acs6121_team15_2025 for Team 15

    Important

    Your repository name should match the above format exactly:

    • The name should be 19 characters long in total.
    • All characters should be lower case (e.g. acs6121, NOT ACS6121)

  4. Then navigate into the root of your new package:

    cd ../acs6121_teamXX_2025/

    ...and create a new directory in there called launch:

    mkdir launch

  5. Inside here create an empty file called explore.launch.py:

    touch ./launch/explore.launch.py

    ... leave this empty for now. You'll need to populate this appropriately later (more details on the Task Brief).

  6. Open up your package's CMakeLists.txt file and add the following text just above the ament_package() line at the very bottom:

    acs6121_teamXX_2025/CMakeLists.txt
    install(DIRECTORY
  launch
  DESTINATION share/${PROJECT_NAME}
)

  7. You can now build this using Colcon by following the same three-step process that you have been following throughout the Simulation Lab Course:

    1. Step 1, navigate to the root of the ROS2 workspace:

      cd ~/ros2_ws/

    2. Step 2, build your package with Colcon:

      colcon build --packages-select acs6121_teamXX_2025 --symlink-install

    3. Step 3, re-source the .bashrc:

      source ~/.bashrc

    Don't forget

    You'll need to follow the above three-step colcon build process whenever you do things like:

    1. Add a new node to your package (don't forget to modify the CMakeLists.txt file too)
    2. Add or modify a launch file
    3. Add or modify a custom interface (like in Part 1)
    4. Copy your package onto a different computer

See Also