ROS (Robot Operating System)

Robot Operating System (ROS) is a open source framework to control robots mainly used in human environments. Its basic concept is a set of processes that can be distributed to a heterogeneous computer cluster. The first versions of ROS were presented by Stanford University in 2007. Since 2008 Willow Garage - a research lab in California- has been developing ROS further.
ROS provides standard operating system services such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. It is based on a graph architecture where processing takes place in nodes that may receive, post and multiplex sensor, control, state, planning, actuator and other messages.