Robot Operating System

The most widely used open-source middleware framework for robot development — not actually an operating system.

Despite its name, ROS isn’t really an operating system; it’s a set of open-source middleware and tools that runs on top of Linux (usually Ubuntu). It originated at Stanford and was later driven forward by Willow Garage. ROS breaks robot software into nodes that communicate through mechanisms like topics and services, and it ships with a large collection of ready-made packages: sensor drivers, coordinate transforms (TF), visualization (RViz), data recording (rosbag), navigation, motion planning, and more. Its value is that people don’t have to reinvent these pieces — a great many robots in both academia and industry expose a ROS interface. Noetic, the final release of ROS 1, reached end of maintenance in 2025; new projects should use ROS 2, though a large amount of existing code and many tutorials are still ROS 1.

Exampleroslaunch starts the camera driver, the arm driver, and the MoveIt planning node all at once, and dragging a target pose around in RViz then makes the arm move to it.

Also called

ROS, ROS 1

Related

Robot Operating System 2 · Node (ROS) · Topic (ROS) · ROS Distribution · RViz / RViz2 · MoveIt Motion Planning Framework

Sources

ROS official site
ROS Wiki: Introduction

As of

2025-05