What ROS version are people currently using? We’re looking at standardising on Ubuntu 18.04 and ROS Melodic. Opinions?
Hi!
We do use ROS Kinetic quite extensively with PX4/MAVROS.
Plus a few sensors and computer vision packages.
I feel it is early to upgrade to ROS Melodic distro. Here is why.
This is the Melodic release announcement end of May: http://www.ros.org/news/2018/05/ros-melodic-morenia-released.html
In particular note this:
“465 packages in the ROS ecosystem are in the initial release of Melodic, compared to 2020 currently in Kinetic”
So Melodic was released 3 months ago with 465 packages. Right now it has 719 (http://repositories.ros.org/status_page/ros_melodic_default.html)
The people using ROS normally use a few sensor driver packages and other bits and pieces outside of official distro to integrate the system they want. For example we use RealSense ZR300 for which driver is not yet released in Melodic. We can probably take the Kinetic package source and build in our workspace. But sometimes this is not straightforward. For example even last year we had to go back to ROS Indigo to try some packages which were not in Kinetic and we could not make them work on Kinetic.
So I would give it few more months.
But good thing about Melodic is your can build it on Mac with very few modifications. I do not think it is possible with Kinetic anymore.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS + ROS Kinetic
I agree with @alexs512 , it might be a bit too early for Melodic. I used both, kinetic and melodic, and melodic does not have a lot of the commonly used packages.
Another issue is the compiler, Ubuntu 18.04 comes with gcc version 7.3 which causes some issues with older packages depending on the c++ standard used.
Ubuntu 16.04 LTS + ROS Kinetic
i think 16.04 and kinetic would do …
Ubuntu 16.04 and ROS Kinetic.