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 completely open source (BSD) and free for others to use, change and commercialize upon. Our primary goal is to enable software developers to build more capable robot applications quickly and easily on a common platform.
Willow Garage is strongly committed to developing open source and reusable software. With the help of an international robotics community, we’ve released software we are building on ROS at code.ros.org. There, you’ll find both research and core libraries we are working on. This includes drivers and novel algorithms, as well as ROS-integration for many popular open source robotics libraries.
ROS development is an ongoing joint effort within the robotics community. The system is based on Switchyard, written by Morgan Quigley at Stanford, and has seen numerous contributions from institutions around the world. To find out more about ROS and ROS community efforts, please visit ros.org.