A Comprehensive Guide to Installing ROS Noetic on NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano: Step-by-Step Setup for Robotics Development

Diving into ROS (Robot Operating System) can feel like stepping into a whole new world — exciting, a little daunting, and full of possibilities. If you’re new to ROS (like me!), setting it up on a powerful yet slightly intimidating platform like the NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano can be an adventure in itself.

The Orin Nano, with its advanced GPU capabilities, is a dream for robotics enthusiasts, providing the muscle needed for AI and computer vision tasks. But getting ROS running smoothly? That’s the very first step on this learning journey.

Step-by-Step Installation of ROS Noetic

1. Set up ROS repositories

The first step is to add the official ROS repositories to your system, which will allow you to access and install all the necessary ROS packages.

sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://packages.ros.org/ros/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ros-latest.list'

2. Add the ROS Repository Key

Adding the ROS repository key helps verify that the packages you download are authentic and secure.

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver 'hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80' --recv-key C1CF6E31E6BADE8868B172B4F42ED6FBAB17C654