ROS is powering the future of robotics in industry, in the enterprise and for developers
Ubuntu has been the primary platform for ROS from the very beginning, thanks to its flexibility and user-friendliness.
ROS is led by Open Robotics, similar to how Canonical supports Ubuntu; Open Robotics steers the ship but it is driven by the community.
As the robotics industry grows, companies and developers continue turning to Open Robotics and Canonical to help make their vision a reality.
The Robot Operating System (ROS) is an open-source framework that helps researchers and developers build and reuse code between robotics applications. ROS is also a global open-source community of engineers, developers and hobbyists who contribute to making robots better, more accessible and available to everyone.
ROS 2 is a complete re-design of the framework, tackling the shortcomings of the first generation, effectively bringing it to industry needs and standards. ROS 2 contains new sets of packages that can be installed alongside ROS 1 to ease migration to a more secure platform. ROS 2 takes advantage of new technologies and newly updated APIs asked for by the community.
ROS has been adopted into some of the biggest names in robotics. The majority of organisations are either using ROS as it can be installed by anyone or a fork of ROS in some form.
And the use-cases are still growing. ROS is used across numerous industries from agriculture to medical devices to vacuum cleaners but is spreading to include all kinds of automation and software-defined dynamic use-cases.
These are some of the companies openly using ROS today and the list only grows and diversifies as time progresses.
ROS is more than 10 years old, and in that time has grown to be the biggest robotics developer community on the planet. There are annual ROSCon events where developers and robot enthusiasts of all kinds come together to learn new things, present their projects and network with each other. There are even several official national events you can attend such as ROSCon Japan or ROSCon France.