Robotic Operating System (ROS) is a Robotics Middleware for robots software development providing operating-system like functionalities on heterogeneous computer clusters and platforms.

Originally started in 2007 by the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the support of the Stanford AI Robot STAIR, development, from 2008 to 2013, migrated to be performed at Willow Garage, a robotics research institute. In 2013, ROS stewardship transitioned to the Open Source Robotics Foundation.

ROS provides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications. It provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management, and more. ROS is licensed under an open source, BSD license.

Today, ROS integrates more than a hundred of robots (see full robots list), ranging from autonomous cars, to UAVs to humanoid robots and using a multitude of ROS supported sensors (see complete sensors list)... ROS is heavily utilised by the research community for service robotics applications, but its technology can be applied to other application areas, including industrial robotics. Its applications such as advanced perception, path/grasp planning, motion tracking can enable manufacturing robotic applications that were previously technically infeasible or cost prohibitive.

ROS currently only runs on Unix-based platforms. Software for ROS is primarily tested on Ubuntu and Mac OS X systems, though the ROS community has been contributing support for Fedora, Gentoo, Arch Linux and other Linux platforms. Eventually, ROS coding can be written in any programming language provided it has it's client library, though, the current focus is on providing strong C++ and Python Support.

ROS today presents it's 10th release ROS Kinetic.

To find more about ROS and ROS Community efforts, visit http://www.ros.org/