What is the Arduino-ROS interface?
Most of the communication between PCs and I/O boards in robots will be through the UART protocol. When the devices communicate with each other, there should be some program on both sides that can translate the serial commands from each of the devices. We can implement our logic to receive and transmit the data from the board to the PC and vice versa. The interfacing code can be different in each I/O board because there are no standard libraries to do this communication.
The Arduino-ROS interface is a standard way of communicating between Arduino boards and a PC. Currently, this interface is exclusive to Arduino boards and boards supported by the Arduino IDE. Some of the examples of those boards are OpenCR (https://robots.ros.org/opencr/) and Teensy (https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/). For other boards, we may need to write a custom ROS interface. Tutorials are provided on the rosserial tutorial page: http://wiki.ros.org/rosserial_client/Tutorials. You...
