Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rospy] - robotiq ros driver dependencies

Question

I am going to install ros driver for robotiq gripper as indicated in http://wiki.ros.org/robotiq But for installing Modbus TCP dependencies (rosdep install robotiq_modbus_tcp), I have the following issue:

ERROR: the following packages/stacks could not have their rosdep keys resolved to system dependencies: robotiq_modbus_tcp: Cannot locate rosdep definition for [rospy]

PS: I am using Ubuntu 16.04 (kinetic),

Thanks a lot in advance for helping me with the issue...

Answer 1

There might be multiple reasons for this. If you perform the following step you should be able to resolve it:

• Make sure that you checked out the correct branch by typing git branch after having cloned the repository. It should output kinetic-devel. If that is not the case switch to the wished branch git checkout kinetic-devel.
• If that is correct make sure that you have installed rospy with sudo apt-get install python-rospy.
• Finally make sure that you have actually sourced the ROS environment variables with source /opt/ros/kinetic/setup.bash (or wherever you have installed it) before calling rosdep install robotiq_modbus_tcp.
• Else you might give it a try to install the package from source: Clone it from the Github and follow these instructions.

Answer 2

I'm fairly new to ROS myself and found myself stuck to this issue for 3 weeks. I tried everything I found on forums to no result. Apparently the issue is that when rosdep update command is skipping updates for the later unsupported ROS distros, such as kinetic. Use the following command to update and then try installing the package again.

rosdep update --include-eol-distros