When the society brought Baxter back into service in January 2026, it was programmed the way Rethink Robotics intended: from a ROS 1 computer next to the robot, with Rethink’s own software kit (SDK). This entry looks back at that setup, which we used until the autumn.
The workstation
The lab has one workstation for the robot. It runs Ubuntu 20.04 with ROS 1 Noetic, the last version of ROS 1, and the university’s staff set up its connection to the robot. Rethink’s SDK sits in a catkin workspace, the ROS 1 way of building a set of packages:
mkdir -p ~/ros_baxter_ws/src
cd ~/ros_baxter_ws/src
wstool init .
wstool merge https://raw.githubusercontent.com/RethinkRobotics/baxter/master/baxter_sdk.rosinstall
wstool update
cd ..
catkin_makeThis downloads five packages from Rethink’s GitHub, all at version 1.2.0 from December 2015: baxter, baxter_common, baxter_examples, baxter_interface and baxter_tools.
The SDK was written for Python 2, while Noetic uses Python 3. Some of the code needed small fixes before it ran. A typical one changes except OSError, e: to except OSError as e:.
A session with the robot
The SDK comes with a script, baxter.sh, that opens a terminal connected to the robot. From there everything is ROS 1:
./baxter.sh
rosrun baxter_tools enable_robot.py -e # motors on
rostopic echo /robot/joint_states # watch the joint angles
rosrun baxter_tools enable_robot.py -d # motors offPrograms were Python scripts in a package of our own, started with rosrun:
import rospy
from baxter_interface import Limb
rospy.init_node('read_arm')
left = Limb('left')
print(left.joint_angles())Baxter’s half of the Baxter × Pepper dance was programmed this way, from joint angles printed by scripts like this one.
What held us back
- One machine. Everything had to happen on the single workstation in the lab, one person at a time.
- Old software. ROS 1 reached its end of life in May 2025. The SDK’s code dates from 2015 and needed fixes to run at all.
- A different world. Current robotics tools and tutorials target ROS 2.
Those three points are what led to the Baxter ROS 2 bridge in October 2026.