Author: Pablo Iñigo Blasco Grupo de Investigación RTCAR Robotica y Tecnología de Computadores Universidad de Sevilla

1. Platform Overview
Pablo Iñigo Blasco
Grupo de Investigación RTCAR
Robotica y Tecnología de Computadores
Universidad de Sevilla

3. Contents
● Overview
● ROS Principles
● ROS History
● Applications
● Community and Software Federation
● Pros and Cons

4. ROS Overview
“ROS is an open-source, meta-operating system for your robot. It provides the services you would expect from an operating
system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-
passing between processes, and package management. It also provides tools and libraries for obtaining, building, writing, and
running code across multiple computers”
● As technology it can be sen as:
●
Robotic Development Platform
●
Integration Software Framework for complex robotics systems
● Even Further “It is a initiative or to promote Robotics”
●
Technology
●
Conveys and Data Standardization
● Open Community
–

5. ROS Overview (II) - Target

6. ROS Overview (III) - Principles
● Software Integration over Development
● Open Source
● Federation of development groups
● Online Community
● Homogeneous and unified documentation (Wiki)
● Social Networks and Mailing lists
● Scientific Approach (promoting research)
● Multiple Product Vision: Research, Academic &
Market (service robotics, ¿industrial?)

7. ROS Overview (III) Main Features
● Distributed Components
● Main operative System: Linux, MacOS, (low support
for windows)
● Programming Languages
● High Support for C++, python
● Lower Support Lisp, Java, Octave, others,
● Platforms: X86 y ARM
● Integrating popular packages: OpenCV, Eigen, Bullet,
OROCOS (KDL, BFL), OpenSLAM, OpenRave, Stage
and Gazebo, PCL, ¿¿MRPT??

8. Some Supported Robots

9. The PR2 Robot
● Fold Towels
● Open Doors
● Opening Drawers
● Fetch Beers
● Plug In
● Recycling trash
● Play Hannoy Towers
● Cart Pushing

10. ROS History (I) Background
● Willow Garage
● Origin - Stanford University and Research Institute
● Spin-off
● Silicon – Valley Area
● Some Researchers
● Gary Bradski
● Kurt Konolige
● Brian P. Gerkey
● Radu Bogdan Rusu

11. ROS History (II) - Evolution
Gracias por los contenidos Creative Commons de la web de ROS y de las transparencias creadas por "Radu Bogdan Rusu" para el evento: "

12. Robotic Software Repository
Federation
Stats (March 2012):
● 2363+ Documented Packages
● 100+ Federated Repositories (90+ Institutions)
● Some of them:
● CMU, TUM, MIT, PENN ...
● Unified Wiki and Documentation
● Autogenerated metainformation

13. Software Organization

14. Examples of Package Contents
● Meta Information (manifest)
● Components (Nodes or launch)
● Libraries
● Tools (every kind)
● Datasets
● Third Party Adapters
● Message Definitions
● Service Definitions

15. Advantages
● For developers and research groups: visibility
● Many people know how to use your packages
● Focus effort on research → don't reinvent the
wheel
● Learn robotics by example
● Checking others code
● Reading others doc
● Promotes conveys, methodologies for general
robotic software development

16. Disadvantages
Change the development philosophy:
●
● Forget the “reinvent the wheel” - go to The Integration Paradigm
● But The integration cost is not zero
–Read packages documentation
–Check third party code
●In Spite of everything → Non-Uniform development methodologies between
packages
●Too Linux system focused (little support for windows or RT systems)
●Not very good for real time applications (custom solutions needed)
●Several package alternatives for the same development targe t
●You have to learn a lot of usefulness stuff for very single projects

17. References
(1) Quigley, Morgan, Brian Gerkey, Ken Conley, Josh Faust, Tully Foote, Jeremy Leibs, Eric Berger, Rob Wheeler, and
Andrew Ng. 2009. ROS: an open-source Robot Operating System. In Open-Source Software workshop of the
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
(2) Iñigo-Blasco, Pablo, Fernando Diaz-del-Rio, Ma Carmen Romero-Ternero, Daniel Cagigas-Muñiz, and Saturnino
Vicente-Diaz. 2012. “Robotics software frameworks for multi-agent robotic systems development” Robotics and
Autonomous Systems (February).
(3) ROS WIKI - www.ros.org
(4) CoTeSys-ROS Fall School on Cognition-enabled Mobile Manipulation.