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Is there an easy way to put ROS on a custom robot?

It depends what you are comparing it to... Creating a robot from scratch is not easy, no matter what software you use. You will have to write drivers for your actuators and sensors anyway.

At least ROS gives you: - good design conventions - the messaging part that helps you write modular code - the ros parameter server to help you configure your code - the logging and visualization tool that will help you debug

then once the base of your robot is working with ROS it will be easier to plug in new sensors (they might be a ROS driver for them), and new algorithms (think localization and navigation for instance)

To get started: let's say you have non ROS drivers for your robot or some of its parts. It's should be relatively straight forward to wrap them in ROS. You might have to create a few custom messages, and wrap the driver calls in some nodes. If you don't have any existing code, then starting from scratch is not difficult either (if you know how to write drivers, but this has nothing to do with ROS).

Good luck