Catkin

Catkin is a collection of CMake macros and associated code used to build packages used in ROS.

It was initially introduced as part of the ROS Fuerte release where it was used for a small set of base packages. For Groovy and Hydro it was significantly modified, and used by many more packages. All released Hydro packages were built using catkin, although existing rosbuild packages can still be built from source on top of the catkin packages. Indigo is very similar, except for some deprecated features that were removed.

Note

This document covers the Indigo version. The Groovy and Hydro versions are documented separately.