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ROS is a type of middleware as explained in the previous blog post. It works as an information center. The Master is the administrator in charge of gathering data, messages, service requests and other information sent by numerous nodes, and connects them to the requested nodes. The identification between the Master and its nodes is through Master IP. Once nodes get Master’s IP and report their own ROS IP to the Master, Master doesn’t care where its nodes are physically set. They can still communicate with them. This is the unique characteristic of ROS for distributed environment. A server is set as the home of ROS Master. Each remote robot is treated as a node to register to the Master. For example let the Master IP be 10.219.10.10 and node IP be 10.219.10.11. IP information is exported in the Master and node bashrc files individually to establish their connection. For Master bashrc file export ROS_MASTER_URI=10.219.10.10 export ROS_IP=10.219.10.10 For node bashrc file export ...

A lot of people are still confused about the concept of ROS which includes both those who use them and those who don't. Robot Operating System is an open-source robot middleware platform that provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, and many useful libraries and tools to develop robot applications. Developed in 2009, initially for the use with the Willow Garage PR2 robot, ROS has now a large community of developers and users. This community has developed important general-use libraries for motion planning, task execution, 2D navigation, and visualization and a lot more that has proved invaluable standards in robotics research. Despite its many advantages, ROS has several shortcomings with regards to usability, portability, and platform dependencies. For ROS, the officially supported operating system is Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution. All these problems are now solved in the second version called ROS2. ROS has a microkernel design where a large number of small tool...