ROS Diamondback is EOL, and these instructions for getting it to work on Windows are severely outdated. They are only kept here for historical reasons.
Please do not expect these steps to work, or try to follow them.
For future Windows support, see the relevant ROS2 resources.
Overview
We are go! Well, not fully yet, but there is partial functionality and enough to be useful in some situations. To be practical, we are not targeting the windows environment as a full blown replacement for linux-ros as windows doesn't have the mechanisms to handle the scaling of complexity (e.g. rosdeps), but it needs to be able to be useful in some simple use case scenarios. For example,
- Monitoring/debugging the robot from a remote windows pc.
- Users interfacing with a robot via simple controlling applications.
- Scenario apps (e.g. smach) that are more conveniently run on the network.
- Manager applications for controlling networked robots.
- Computationally heavy algorithms running on an idle pc away from the robot.
Status
Mingw Build Environment - cross compiling in linux with mingw.
Mingw Standalone Clients - running clients detached from ros trees.
Mingw Runtime Environment - roscore, roslaunch and others.
Current functionality has been enabled by compiling with the mingw cross-compiler in linux. The cross compiling is managed by eros and the windows specific utilities and tools are in win_ros. As ros moves to a purely cmake build environment, we hope to bring in the msvc compatibility.
