Introduction to ROS (Robot Operating System)

What is ROS?

ROS (Robot Operating System) is an open-source framework for building robot software. Despite the name, it's not an OS — it's middleware that helps robot components communicate.

Why ROS?

• Reusable packages for common tasks (navigation, vision).
• Hardware abstraction — same code, different robots.
• Huge community and tools.

Core Concepts

Concept	Meaning
Node	A program doing one task
Topic	Channel for messages
Publisher	Sends messages
Subscriber	Receives messages

How Nodes Communicate

Camera Node → publishes → /image topic → Vision Node subscribes
Vision Node → publishes → /commands → Motor Node subscribes

A Simple Publisher (Python)

import rospy
from std_msgs.msg import String

rospy.init_node("talker")
pub = rospy.Publisher("/chatter", String, queue_size=10)
pub.publish("Hello robot!")

FAQs

ROS 1 or ROS 2?

ROS 2 is the modern version with better real-time and security. Learn ROS 2. More in our Robotics section.

What languages does ROS use?

Mainly C++ and Python.