Hello snakeninny,
At this point in your research I hope you now understand the concept of nodes and packages in ROS, or simply the existence of them. Due to the complexity of a lot of the decisions made or computations being performed by the robot, it is no longer feasible for all of the software to be written in one package. Therefore a lot of functionalities are grouped into these nodes and executed together.
From your background, you can understand these nodes as objects that does different things. Eg. A node that processes computer vision; an eye object. A node that processes speech; an mouth object. A node that processes actuator controls, a cerebellum object. Objects in a OOD sense.
What ROS as an "operating system" does is to facilitate a framework where these nodes can all communicate with one another to perform complex tasks that requires simultaneous stimuli from different sensors and perform calculations.
The Roomba is a very simple robot compared to other systems you may see being created with ROS. A Roomba replica can easily be created with an Arduino. It's like comparing a goldfish to a human brain. We can no doubt sleep, eat and move as a goldfish can; just like how a ROS system can do what a Roomba does. But in cases where you want to be able to tell the difference between what you are eating, or being able to dance, a goldfish cannot do that.
In most cases, I like to think of micro controllers like the arduino as controllers for individual components, taking orders from individual nodes. Eg. A movement node says it wants to move forward, and the arduino controls the ESC on the robot to move the motor. The arduino knows how to turn, how to activate motors, but it will not be smart enough to know how to move to properly tango.
A usual chain of command in systems I work with looks something like:
- Sensors detect object
- AI node uses other sensors to decide what type of object it is
- AI decides that it needs to move left-forward-right to avoid the object
- Movement node receives left-forward-right command from AI
- Movement node sends left, forward, right as seperate commands to the Arduino that controlls the motors, checking between commands that the robot is moving correctly.
All this is based off of my own understanding and experience with ROS, and ROS can certainly be more complex or simple depending on the application. But hopefully this is a starting point for you.
Cheers,
Dulluhan
