Introduction to ROS

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a flexible framework for writing robot software. It is a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions that aim to simplify the task of creating complex and robust robot behavior across a wide variety of robotic platforms. In this chapter, you will learn the basic concepts of ROS.

Core Concepts

• Nodes: A node is an executable that uses ROS to communicate with other nodes.
• Topics: Nodes can publish messages to a topic as well as subscribe to a topic to receive messages.
• Messages: Topics have a message type, which defines the data structure of the messages sent on that topic.
• Services: A request/reply communication model. One node offers a service, and another node can use that service.
• Actions: For long-running tasks, actions provide a way to send a request and receive feedback and a final result.