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robot operating system (ROS)

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open-source toolbox for building and operating robots. It’s not an actual operating system like Windows or macOS, but a collection of software tools and middleware that helps developers create robot applications. ROS makes it easier to program how a robot moves, sees, and interacts with its environment by providing a common framework for different parts of a robot to communicate and work together. This means that instead of starting from scratch, developers can use ROS to build complex robot behaviors more quickly and share their work with others.

ROS provides a structured communications layer above the host operating system, offering a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions designed to simplify the task of creating complex robot behaviors across a wide variety of robotic platforms. ROS facilitates hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management.

The system is designed to be language-independent, with client libraries available in C++, Python, and Lisp, and it encourages collaborative development by providing tools for visualization, simulation, and debugging. ROS has been widely adopted in both academic and industrial contexts for a range of robotic applications, from autonomous vehicles to industrial robots.

ROS’s architecture allows for the development of distributed computing applications, with processes (nodes) that can communicate over a network, either through publishing/subscribing messages on topics, providing/requesting services, or accessing shared data via a central database (parameter server).

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