Appendix

Robotic Operating System (ROS) was a framework designed to enable the development of software for complex robots and was developed by a company called Willow Garage, specifically for the control of the PR2 robot. The PR2 was a human-sized robot with two 7-degree of freedom (7DOF) arms and an entire array of sensors. Controlling this very complex robot required the interaction of a multitude of sensors, motors, and communications. The ROS framework allowed the development of robot components to be done independently. While not an operation system in the traditional sense of the word, it is a Modular Open Source Architecture (MOSA).

The primary tool of ROS is a robust publish-subscribe service that makes talking between processes — that is, Inter-Process Communications (IPC) — easy and flexible. It also standardized a lot of the interfaces between sensors, motors, and controls for robots.

We will be using ROS 2 throughout this book. ROS 2 is a new version...