Robot Operating System

Robot Operating System
Robot Operating System
Original author(s)	Willow Garage and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Repository	github.com/ros2 ;
Operating system	Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows
Type	Library, OS
License	BSD license
Website	http://pr.willowgarage.com/wiki/ROS/

ROS is a Robot Operating system created by the originally developed (2007) in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in support of the Stanford AI Robot (STAIR) project but now (as of 2008) hosted by Willow Garage, a robotics research institute/incubator. It is free for commercial and research use under a BSD license. The library runs primarily on Linux but is intended to be cross-platform for Mac OS X, Windows. ROS provides standard operating system services such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. It is a graph based architecture where processing takes place in nodes that may receive, post and multiplex sensor, control, state, planning, actuator and other messages.

ROS has two basic "sides": The operating system side ros as described above and ros-pkg, a whole series of user contributed nodes that implement functionality such as Simultaneous localization and mapping, planning, perception, simulation etc.

ROS is released under the terms of the BSD license, and is open source software.

Applications

ROS areas include

A master coordination node called bothearder (for roBot Hearder)
Publishing or Subscribing data streams (images, stereo, laser, control, actuator, contact ...)
Multiplexing information
Nodes creation and destruction
Nodes are seemlessly distributed, allowing distributed operation over multi-core, multi-processor, GPU and clusters.
Logging
Parameter server
Test systems

ROS Package application areas will include Perception