ROS or Robot Operating Systems is an open source framework designed for designing robots. ROS is commonly installed upon a Linux operating system. There are different ROS versions:

• Lunar (Latest)
• Kinetic (LTS)
• Jade
• Indigo
• ...

The ROS distribution we're using for Eurobot is the 'Kinetic' versions.

What's great about ROS, it's that there is an ever growing community that is sharing their code & projects of robotic machines. This is great because there are many build-in/downloadable libraries ready to use and the end user doesn't need to reinvent the wheel for classic robotic manipulations, like for example:

• Drivers to read/write to sensors
• Robotic algorithms (navigation, interpret sensor data, object manipulation)
• ...

In this section we will go over the basic concepts of ROS, the actual installation and the realisation of a project from scratch.