Installing on Ubuntu

18.04, 20.04 (experimental)

Manual installation

First set up some basic environment variables

export UBUNTU_VERSION=$(lsb_release -cs) #(Ubuntu 18.04: bionic, Ubuntu 20.04: focal (experimental))
export ROS_VERSION=melodic #(Ubuntu 18.04: melodic, Ubuntu 20.04: noetic (experimental))
export CATKIN_WS=~/maplab_ws #(Wherever you want to install maplab)

Install required system packages

# Install ROS
# NOTE: Follow the official ROS installation instructions.
sudo apt install software-properties-common
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $UBUNTU_VERSION main"
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ros/rosdistro/master/ros.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt update
sudo apt install ros-$ROS_VERSION-desktop-full "ros-$ROS_VERSION-tf2-*" "ros-$ROS_VERSION-camera-info-manager*" --yes


# Install framework dependencies.
sudo apt install autotools-dev ccache doxygen dh-autoreconf git liblapack-dev libblas-dev libgtest-dev libreadline-dev libssh2-1-dev pylint clang-format-6.0 python-autopep8 python-catkin-tools python-pip python-git python-setuptools python-termcolor python-wstool libatlas3-base libv4l-dev --yes

pip install requests

Update ROS environment

Follow this if you freshly installed ROS, if you already had ROS installed you can skip this.

sudo rosdep init
rosdep update
echo ". /opt/ros/$ROS_VERSION/setup.bash" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Install ccache for faster rebuilds.

(OPTIONAL but HIGHLY RECOMMENDED) ccache is a tool that caches intermediate build files to speed up rebuilds of the same code. On Ubuntu it can be set up with the following command. The max. cache size is set to 10GB and can be adapted in the lines below:

sudo apt install -y ccache &&\
echo 'export PATH="/usr/lib/ccache:$PATH"' | tee -a ~/.bashrc &&\
source ~/.bashrc && echo $PATH
ccache --max-size=10G

Now g++/gcc should now point to:

which g++ gcc
/usr/lib/ccache/g++
/usr/lib/ccache/gcc

Show cache statistics:

ccache -s

Empty the cache and reset the stats:

ccache -C -z

ccache only works for a clean workspace. You will need a make clean otherwise.

Create a catkin workspace

To create a workspace, run:

mkdir -p $CATKIN_WS/src
cd $CATKIN_WS
catkin init
catkin config --merge-devel # Necessary for catkin_tools >= 0.4.
catkin config --extend /opt/ros/$ROS_VERSION
catkin config --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release

For more informative and readable output use:

catkin config --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo -DCMAKE_CXX_FLAGS=-fdiagnostics-color

Cloning maplab repository

Now you can clone maplab and its dependencies via SSH, https clone is not supported for developer version. SSH keys need to be installed and connected to your GitHub account, as explained here.

cd src
git clone git@github.com:ethz-asl/maplab.git --recursive -b develop

Setting up the linter

This setups a linter which checks if the code conforms to our style guide during commits. These steps are only necessary if you plan on contributing to maplab.

cd $CATKIN_WS/src/maplab
./dependencies/internal/linter/init-git-hooks.py

Building maplab

cd $CATKIN_WS
catkin build maplab

Note: Currently some of our dependencies contain superfluous packages that will not have all the necessary dependencies. Therefore compilation will fail for these packages, if you try to build the complete workspace with: catkin build.

Troubleshooting

Please visit the FAQ and the additional instructions on debugging provided here here.