ROS is a robot operating system originally developed (2007) in the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in support of the Stanford AI Robot (STAIR) project but now (as of 2008) developed primarily by Willow Garage, a robotics research institute/incubator. It is free for commercial and research use under a BSD license. The library runs primarily on Linux but is intended to be cross-platform for Mac OS X and Windows. 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 a graph based architecture where processing takes place in nodes that may receive, post and multiplex sensor, control, state, planning, actuator and other messages.

ROS has two basic “sides”: The operating system side ros as described above and ros-pkg, a whole series of user contributed nodes that implement functionality such as Simultaneous localization and mapping, planning, perception, simulation etc.

ROS is released under the terms of the BSD license, and is open source software.

Applications

• ROS areas include
• A master coordination node
• Publishing or Subscribing to data streams (images, stereo, laser, control, actuator, contact …)
• Multiplexing information
• Node creation and destruction
• Nodes are seamlessly distributed, allowing distributed operation over multi-core, multi-processor, GPU and clusters.
• Logging
• Parameter server
• Test systems

ROS Package application areas will include

• Perception
• Object Identification
• Segmentation and Recognition
• Face Recognition
• Gesture Recognition
• Motion Tracking
• Ego-motion
• Motion Understanding
• Structure from motion (SFM)
• Stereopsis Stereo vision: depth perception from 2 cameras

Web site community for open source robot operating system is www.ros.org. If you wish to find out about Willow Garage’s role in developing ROS, please visit the Willow Garage Web site.

Ho it can be..?
There are many robot tutorial has been written and published through blog or web. I found interesting robot tutorial from this web. The author said that he build the robot just in 2 hours, you also can see the video there… just visit the web…

Plermjai Inchuay, plermjai@loxinfo.co.th

Award winner from VingPeaw Competition 2543, the robot built with 2051, L293D, and four IR sensors. Simple circuit and platform, quick tracking and easy-understand program using C language.

I designed my robot, which use two motors control rear wheels and the single front wheel is free. It has 4-infrared sensors on the bottom for detect black tracking tape, when the sensors detected black color, output of comparator, LM324 is low logic and the other the output is high. Microcontroller AT89C2051 and H-Bridge driver L293D were used to control direction and speed of motor.

Fig 1. Circuit diagram of my Robot.

Fig 2. Circuit diagram of Infrared sensors and comparators.

Fig 4. Position of sensors, left hand side is side view and right hand side is top view.

Software
Software for write to AT89C2051 is robot1.hex ,which was written by C-language ,the source code is robot1.c compiled by using MC51 in TINY model with my start up code robot.asm .MPEG files

Sample of competition between 2051 and 68HC11.

• movie1.mpg (1,303kB)
• movie2.mpg (373kB)

Source: www.kmitl.ac.th