Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open source piece of software. Its development started at Willow Garage, a technology incubator and robotics research laboratory. Its origin dates back to several projects at Stanford University from the mid-2000s, where researchers found themselves reinventing the wheel every time they had to build the software for each project.
In 2007, Willow Garage took the lead and gave rise to ROS. The main goal was to reuse existing code and make it possible to prototype new robot designs quickly, focusing on high-level functionality and minimizing the need for editing code. If you are curious about how ROS has become the de facto standard for robot application development, you can view an interactive page at https://www.ros.org/history.
ROS is intended for the development of applications where different devices have to talk to...
