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The answers you are getting are good. But long. A short answer is

Your question: "How does the information in ROS get to the physical hardware inside your robot?"

There are two answers:

1) You robot might have a computer inside of it that is running ROS. Either an X86 "PC" type computer of a smaller ARM based computer. This is common with larger robots or,

2) Your robot might have a small micro controller that is way to small to run Linux and ROS. So you make a radio link and run a ROS Bridge on both the PC and the uP inside the robot. ROS Bridge allows a ROS Node to run on the uP. (You can Google ROS Bridge for more info.

That is the end of my short answers

Now a comment: ROS allows all kinds of variations. You might even have multiple computers inside your robot some running Linux and ROS and others being just simple micro controllers perhaps running some RTOS (real time OS) or not. Or to save space and power in the robot you can move one or more of the ROS computers physically outside but functionally inside the robot using WiFi. You can mix and match. . For your purposes. with a uP inside the robot and ROS only running on the desktop you'd be looking at ROS Bridge