Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
ROS is a software run-time and communication protocol, intended to allow complex software to be designed without specific hardware knowledge. Also available on Windows and MacOS, ROS versions for Ubuntu are linked to the version of Ubuntu.
“ROS is an open-source robot meta-operating system,” according to iWave. “It performs operating-system-like functions such as hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message passing between processes, and package management. ROS also includes tools and libraries for acquiring, constructing, writing, and running code across multiple computers.”
There is a ROS package for everything, added iWave, whether you want to compute trajectory, run SLAM algorithms, or implement remote control. Small embedded platforms, including bare-metal microcontrollers, can participate in the ROS environment as first-class participants rather than being separated from it by a device driver.
Digital twinning is supported, allowing developers to simulate a robot in before deploying the real thing: “tools like Gazebo even let you create simulations with robots you don’t own”.
It gets used in applications from agriculture to medical devices and drones to vacuum cleaners.
The IWave single-board computers offer interfaces including Gigabit Ethernet, USB 2.0, USB 3.0, PCIe ports, HDMI 2.0, MIPI CSI, MIPI DSI, LVDS ports and audio jacks.
