ROS: An Open-Source Robot Operating System

This paper gives an overview of ROS, an open-source robot operating system. ROS is not an operating system in the traditional sense of process management and scheduling; rather, it provides a structured communications layer above the host operating systems of a heterogeneous compute cluster. In this paper, the authors discuss how ROS relates to existing robot software frameworks, and briefly overview some of the available application software which uses ROS. Writing software for robots is difficult, particularly as the scale and scope of robotics continues to grow. Different types of robots can have wildly varying hardware, making code reuse nontrivial.