Robot Operating System
Procerus Unicorn with a Kestrel autopilot
We use ROS extensively in my work at GTRI ATAS, and I also used it as a Faculty Research Assistant at the Naval Postgraduate School. I first started to use it around 2011 in my work at the Systems Engineering Department of the NPS. It is a product of the Open Source Robotics Foundation and has been widely embraced by industry and academia. In my own work I have used it to:
Fly the first swarm of 50 unmanned aircraft (that article is misleading… we had a core team of 6 people and 17 people in total to fly those 50 aircraft)
Fly swarm-on-swarm operations in the Service Academy Swarm Challenge
Fly for the Office of Naval Research
Service Academy Swarm Challenge. Image credit: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Aircraft from the Service Academy Swarm Challenge. Image credit: Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The basic unit of ROS is called a Node. ROS uses a publish-subscribe architecture categorized by subject into a series of topics to communicate messages between nodes. There are also services, actions, and parameters. ROS uses a custom version of CMake called catkin. ROS uses packages and end-users are encouraged to contribute to packages in an open way. ROS bags are used as a logging mechanism.
Credits
https://www.ros.org/
