Robot Operating System

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a set of software libraries and tools that help you build robot applications. From drivers to state-of-the-art algorithms, and with powerful developer tools, ROS has what you need for your next robotics project. And it's all open source.

ROS is used by students of all ages, from kids interacting with robots in museum exhibits to graduate students learning about the latest solutions to common robotics problems. Because it supports such a wide variety of robots, including low-cost platforms like the TurtleBot and LEGO Mindstorms, ROS is especially well-suited to classroom use.

Melodic Morenia is the 12th official ROS release. It is supported on Ubuntu Artful and Bionic, along with Debian Stretch. Get Melodic Morenia now!

At Open Robotics, we work with industry, academia, and government to create and support open software and hardware for use in robotics, from research and education to product development.

Working with our global community, we offer two open source products: ROS and Gazebo. Program your robots with ROS and simulate them with Gazebo. These tools are relied upon by hundreds of thousands of users and developers around the world.

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a set of software libraries and tools that help you build robot applications. From drivers to state-of-the-art algorithms, and with powerful developer tools, ROS has what you need for your next robotics project. And it's all open source.

The unifying theme of our team and our work is openness. We use and we build open systems. To the greatest extent possible, we freely distribute our work product, whether software, hardware, or documentation, under an open source license.

Of course we can be open while still keeping secrets when needed. It's no problem for our team be exposed to and work with client-confidential information, from designs and plans to source code. But we aim in each project to allow our team to focus our development efforts on producing more and better open tools that will benefit the broader community. After all, it's the development of those tools that got us where we are today.

Robot Operating System (ROS or ros) is robotics middleware (i.e. collection of software frameworks for robot software development). Although ROS is not an operating system, it provides services designed for a heterogeneous computer cluster such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. Running sets of ROS-based processes are represented in a graph architecture where processing takes place in nodes that may receive, post and multiplex sensor data, control, state, planning, actuator, and other messages. Despite the importance of reactivity and low latency in robot control, ROS itself is not a real-time OS (RTOS). It is possible, however, to integrate ROS with real-time code. The lack of support for real-time systems has been addressed in the creation of ROS 2.0, a major revision of the ROS API which will take advantage of modern libraries and technologies for core ROS functionality and add support for real-time code and embedded hardware. Software in the ROS Ecosystem can be separated into three groups: language-and platform-independent tools used for building and distributing ROS-based software; ROS client library implementations such as roscpp, rospy, and roslisp; packages containing application-related code which uses one or more ROS client libraries.Both the language-independent tools and the main client libraries (C++, Python, and Lisp) are released under the terms of the BSD license, and as such are open source software and free for both commercial and research use. The majority of other packages are licensed under a variety of open source licenses. These other packages implement commonly used functionality and applications such as hardware drivers, robot models, datatypes, planning, perception, simultaneous localization and mapping, simulation tools, and other algorithms. The main ROS client libraries are geared toward a Unix-like system, primarily because of their dependence on large collections of open-source software dependencies. For these client libraries, Ubuntu Linux is listed as "Supported" while other variants such as Fedora Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows are designated "experimental" and are supported by the community. The native Java ROS client library, rosjava, however, does not share these limitations and has enabled ROS-based software to be written for the Android OS. rosjava has also enabled ROS to be integrated into an officially supported MATLAB toolbox which can be used on Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows. A JavaScript client library, roslibjs has also been developed which enables integration of software into a ROS system via any standards-compliant web browser.