ROS - an Open Source Framework for Robotics Programming

ROS (Robot Operating System) is an open source framework (not a real operating system) for writing robot software. It started in 2007 by Eric Berger and Keenan Wyrobek (they were PhD students at Stanford University) with the goal of simplifying the process of creating complex robot behavior across a wide variety of robotic platforms, which enables software developers with little robotics hardware knowledge to write software for robots. ROS is licensed under the permissive BSD license. ROS has a lot of components and tools. ROS provides common robot-specific libraries and tools. ROS has also powerful development tools which support introspecting, debugging, plotting, and visualizing the state of the system being developed.