I want to install a Raspberry Pi 3 board on an autonomous robot and use it to monitor and control the robot. All communication is via WiFi Internet with ROS Kinetic working on multiple machines.

To use Pi resources more efficiently, I thought I needed an operating system like Raspbian Stretch Lite. The interaction with this system is done through type commands. It doesn’t have GUI and other software included with the Desktop version. In conclusion, it is a perfect operating system if you want to not stress the Pi board with too many tasks that you do not need anyway.

The system will be configured so that Raspberry Pi is the master. The Roscore will run on the robot instead on the remote PC. On the PC I just want to see the message that coming from Pi or send some manual correction back to the robot.

In this tutorial, you will find the steps necessary to install the ROS Kinetic version with no GUI tools (ROS-Commo includes ROS package, build, and communication libraries).

• Step 1: Download and install Raspbian Stretch Lite
  The installation instructions for Raspberry Lite on Raspberry Pi 3 are described here.

• Step 2: Connect via SSH to Raspberry Pi to run more easily the ROS Kinetic installation controls.

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

  wget http://packages.ros.org/ros.key -O - | sudo apt-key add -

  sudo apt-get update

  sudo apt-get install -y python-rosdep python-rosinstall-generator python-wstool python-rosinstall build-essential cmake

  sudo apt install dirmngr

  sudo rosdep init

  rosdep update

  rosinstall_generator ros_comm --rosdistro kinetic --deps --wet-only --tar > kinetic-ros_comm-wet.rosinstall

  wstool init src kinetic-ros_comm-wet.rosinstall

  rosdep install -y --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro kinetic -r --os=debian:stretch

  sudo ./src/catkin/bin/catkin_make_isolated --install -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release --install-space /opt/ros/kinetic -j2

  source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash

  echo 'source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash' >> ~/.bashrc

  mkdir -p ~/catkin_workspace/src

  cd catkin_workspace/src

  catkin_init_workspace

  cd ~/catkin_workspace/

  catkin_make

  source ~/catkin_workspace/devel/setup.bash

  echo 'source ~/catkin_workspace/devel/setup.bash' >> ~/.bashrc

  export | grep ROS

• Step 3 (optional): The installation process takes at least two hours. If you have problems and want to reinstall the operating system with ROS Kinetic, the simplest solution is to clone the memory card as soon as you have finished the initial installation. Here are the steps needed to clone the memory card.

Because I’m not an expert on Linux or ROS commands, I’ve found valuable information here and here.