Do local and remote machines have to run the same version of ROS?

Question

I just installed Ubuntu 18.04, and with it ROS Melodic Morenia on my workstation. I have a Raspberry Pi based bobot running Lubuntu 16.04 with ROS Kinetic Kame. Will these machines be able to communicate, or will I have to try and upgrade the Pi to 18.04 with Melodic too ?

I have already tried to make this work. The workstation sees topics being published on the Pi. However I see a raspicam_node on the Pi publishing at 10 hz on the Pi. When I check the rate of raspicam_node, on the workstation, rostopic says that no messages have been published. I need to determine if this is because the versions of ROS are incompatible, or if I am doing something else wrong.

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Originally posted by elpidiovaldez on ROS Answers with karma: 142 on 2018-10-14

Post score: 0

Answer 1

As long as the specific messages have not been changed between the two ROS distributions it should be work fine maybe your ip address didn't set correctly

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Originally posted by Hamid Didari with karma: 1769 on 2018-10-14

This answer was ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 3

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Original comments

Comment by chrissunny94 on 2018-10-15:
Yes , from my experience , it works fairly well across different variants .

Comment by msadowski on 2018-10-15:
I remember having huge problems with some marker messages when I was using a combo ROS Kinetic + ROS Indigo. I would highly recommend sticking to the same distro if possible

Answer 2

I am new to ROS too and below are some of my experiences

1. Both workstation and the mobile robot can have different rosdistro. My current setup is Lunar + Kinect

2. Never forget to export the following three things in your terminal or ~/.bashrc. All the addresses below are for display purpose. It is different for everyone. In my case, without any one of them, the whole thing will not work.

• #export ROS_MASTER_URI=http://192.168.1.118:11311/ (address displayed on workstation's roscore)
• #export ROS_HOSTNAME=192.168.1.118 (address of master/slave)
• #export ROS_IP=192.168.1.118 (address of master/slave)

3. Lastly, try synchronize time of both workstation and the mobile robot. For example, try sudo ntpdate 192.168.6.104 (Address of master) on your mobile robot either by ssh or ~/.bashrc

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Originally posted by KinWah with karma: 91 on 2018-10-15

This answer was NOT ACCEPTED on the original site

Post score: 1