Robot Operating System: overview and case study

Abstract

Creating software for robots is difficult because of the sheer amount of code required. The code needs to encompass everything from drivers to the actual functional program. This is why a group of students decided to create a new robotics middleware called Robot Operating System (ROS). The goal of ROS was to separate the program from the robot specific operating system to make the development process easier and more standardized. In this thesis we will explore the different ROS versions, as well as the main working principles of ROS including nodes and their communication. We’ll also explore the iRobot Create® 3 educational robot through a case study and develop a simple navigation program for it. Additionally, we’ll conduct an experiment with the Create® 3 to measure the responsivity of its infra-red sensors and find a function to convert the output to linear using regression.