Robot operating systems (ROS) are everywhere in today’s robotics. Web pages, wikis, and blogs cover in depth the required knowledge to successfully run a project with ROS. However, those references do not address a global and thorough view of what ROS is. This book closes this gap. It not only presents the foundations and coding with ROS, but also shows a broad set of projects developed with ROS and applied in real conditions. Those projects represent a wide variety of configurations, sensors, actuators, libraries, and so on. One key feature of this book deals with the explanation of libraries extending the core functionalities of ROS.

This book has a lot of code. This feature is quite welcome for newbies and experts who want to replicate the successful robots detailed here. Another more-than-appreciated feature of this book is the section called “Software Engineering with ROS.” This section highlights various auxiliary functionalities/projects that improve the core capabilities of ROS, for instance, web services and rapid prototyping tools. The book closes with advanced tools such as advanced debuggers and real-time implementations in ROS.