Key ROS concepts

ROS

Robot Operating System (ROS) is a flexible framework and set of tools used to create and manage robots. It uses peer-to-peer topology for communication between robot processes, supports multiple programming languages, and provides tools for robot software development.

Node

Nodes are ROS processes that perform computation. They can communicate with each other by passing messages (topics).

Topics

Topics are mediums over which nodes exchange messages. They provide a link between two nodes. A topic is a channel for anonymous communication. Multiple nodes can publish and/or subscribe to a given topic.

Subscriber

A subscriber is a node that tracks the messages published to a topic.

Publisher

A publisher is a node that writes to a topic to which other nodes can subscribe.

ROScore

ROScore is a set of nodes that are necessary for the ROS 1 environment to work. ROScore starts a ROSmaster node, ROS permanent server, and a node where logs are published. ROS 2 does not use ROScore.