ROS (Robot Operating System)

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a flexible framework for writing robot software. It is a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions that aim to simplify the task of creating complex and robust robot behavior across a wide variety of robotic platforms. The below figure shows four different elements of ROS. Plumbing: While multiple programs are running on your system, ROS enables these programs to communicate with each other. Also, it provides different device drivers to communicate easily with your hardware.

Tools: ROS has many basic tools which are important when you are working with robots such as, simulation, visualization, GUI, and data logging. These tools facilitate your efforts while you are working with robots.

Capabilities: There are several capabilities in ROS i.e. for control, planning, perception, mapping, manipulation and you can use what other experts already wrote for the ROS ecosystem. You don't need to create them from scratch.

Ecosystem: ROS is a big ecosystem. Software is organized in packages so you can easily install and use them. Ros provides the entire software distribution that includes many tutorials and documents that you can find online.

Robot Operating System (ROS) is software framework, which makes building robots easier and more enjoyable. ROS includes everything necessary, from drivers to high level algorithm. For example it allows to view robot movement as a 3D model. Robot can be controlled through a simple graphic interface.

ROS is open source. The main goal of ROS is to support code sharing and collaboration in robotics research and development. One ROS system consists of several independent nodes that communicate with other nodes using the publish / subscribe logic.

For example, a mobile robot may include a camera node and a video processing node. The camera node publishes the camera image to a specific topic, such as /camera/image. To view the image, another computer runs an image display node that receives the image from the same theme /camera/image. Communication goes through ROS.