Programming Robots with ROS

Preface

ROS, the Robot Operating System, is an open source framework for getting robots to do things. ROS is meant to serve as a common software platform for people who are building and using robots. This common platform lets people share code and ideas more readily and, perhaps more importantly, means that you do not have to spend years writing software infrastructure before your robots start moving!

ROS has been remarkably successful. At the time of writing, in the official distribution of ROS, there are over 2,000 software packages, written and maintained by almost 600 people. Approximately 80 commercially available robots are supported, and we can find at least 1,850 academic papers that mention ROS. We no longer have to write everything from scratch, especially if we’re working with one of the many robots that support ROS, and can spend more time thinking about robotics, rather than bit-fiddling and device drivers.

ROS consists of a number of parts:

1. A set of drivers that let you read data from sensors and send commands to motors and other actuators, in an abstracted, well-defined format. A wide variety of popular hardware is supported, including a growing number of commercially available robot systems.

2. A large and growing collection of fundamental robotics algorithms that allow you to build maps of the world, navigate around it, represent and interpret sensor data, plan motions, manipulate objects, and do a lot of other stuff. ROS has become very popular in the robotics ...