Robot Operating System or better known as ROS is a completely open source operating system for robots.

The main idea behind it is to avoid reinventing the wheel and to provide standardized functionalities so that you don’t waste time on hardware abstraction from scratch because someone else has done it before. It provides an easy entry point for hobbyists and professionals into the field of robot programming. ROS was developed in 2006 by Willow Garage, a California-based company. The goal was to build a general-purpose framework and they have been maintaining and developing it ever since. ROS has many versions or distributions (known as distros), which appear with every new version of Ubuntu.