Robot Operative System (ROS)
ROS (Robot Operating System) provides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications. It is a Robotics middleware providing operating system-like functionality on a heterogeneous computer. ROS provides standard operating system services such as hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, implementation of commonly used functionality (message-passing between processes), package management, and more. Despite the importance of reactivity and low latency in robot control, ROS is not a Realtime OS, though it is possible to integrate ROS with realtime code.
ROS ecosystem can be separated into three groups:
- Language
- ROS client library implementations such as roscpp rospy and roslisp
- Packages containin applications-related code which uses one or more ROS client-libraries
ROS is licensed under an open source, BSD license.