The ROS Ecosystem

ROS Has Solutions to Your Robot Problems

Despite the name, ROS is not, in fact, an operating system. Rather, it’s an SDK (software development kit) that provides the building blocks you need to build your robot applications. Whether your application is a class project, a scientific experiment, a research prototype, or a final product, ROS will help you to achieve your goal faster.

And it’s all open source.

Plumbing

At its core, ROS provides a message-passing system, often called “middleware” or “plumbing”. Communication is one of the first needs to arise when implementing a new robot application, or really any software system that will interact with hardware. ROS’s built-in and well-tested messaging system saves you time by managing the details of communication between distributed nodes via an anonymous publish/subscribe pattern. This approach encourages good practices in your software development, including fault isolation, separation of concerns, and clear interfaces. Using ROS results in systems that are easier to maintain, contribute to, and reuse.

Along the way you can take advantage of the vast community experience that has resulted in standard ROS message formats; these standards are used for interacting with everything from LIDAR and cameras to localization algorithms and user interfaces.

Tools

Building robot applications is challenging. You have all the difficulties of any software development effort combined with the need to interact asynchronously with the physical world, through sensors and actuators. To build applications efficiently, you need good developer tools. ROS has them, including: launch, introspection, debugging, visualization, plotting, logging, and playback. These tools accelerate the progress of your dev team, and they can be included with your product when you ship it.

Capabilities

The ROS ecosystem is a cornucopia of robot software. Whether you need a device driver for your GPS, a walk and balance controller for your quadruped, or a mapping system for your mobile robot, ROS has something for you. From drivers to algorithms, to user interfaces, ROS provides the building blocks that allow you to focus on your application.

The goal of the ROS project is to continually raise the bar on what is taken for granted, and thus to lower the barrier to entry to building robot applications. Anyone with a good idea for a useful (or fun, or interesting) robot should be able to make that idea real, without having to understand everything about the underlying hardware and software.

Community

The ROS community is large, diverse, and global. From students and hobbyists to multinational corporations and government agencies, people and organizations of all stripes keep the ROS project going.

The community hub and neutral steward for the project is Open Robotics, who hosts the shared online services (such as this website), create and manage distribution releases (including the binary packages that you install), and develop and maintain much of the core software within ROS. Open Robotics also offers engineering services related to ROS.