Why are there turtles everywhere in ROS land?

I'm impressed that ROS community has never run short of idea for the turtles for the distribution code name (ROS1, ROS2). But I'm wondering why turtle?

Asked by 130s on 2020-03-18 21:04:55 UTC

Comments

Hi @130s, shouldn't ROS Discourse be more appropriate for this discussion?

Asked by parzival on 2020-03-19 08:24:43 UTC

@parzival This isn't really a discussion topic so it's better here as a question.

Asked by tfoote on 2020-03-19 12:26:10 UTC

Answers

American coworkers are talking about the link to LOGO. And indeed from this post from 2009 about the release of turtlesim I read:

In an effort to simplify ROS adoption for new users, we developed turtlesim, a LOGO-inspired tool that provides a hands-on approach to learning ROS basics.

Asked by 130s on 2020-03-18 21:11:09 UTC

Comments

Exactly! The background of turtles go back to graphics but even in the 70s or so there were “turtlebot” pen-drawing toys. ROS simply adopted the convention

Asked by stevemacenski on 2020-03-19 10:13:53 UTC

I talked about this a bit in my interview on the ROS Developers Podcast.

https://www.theconstructsim.com/rdp042-ros-developed-ros-platform-manager-tully-foote/ Starting around 32:44

Asked by tfoote on 2020-03-19 12:30:59 UTC

Comments

As we do with others who post a "link only answer", I'd ask you to post a description/summary of what you said in your interview, here in your answer. If/when the podcast disappears (which happens quite often), we would at least have the textual version here in your answer.

Asked by gvdhoorn on 2020-03-19 12:54:47 UTC

I'd like to write a noteably longer more authoritative answer with links etc but that's more time than I have right now. Until I have time to circle back for that I'd rather keep it with the more casual answer in the podcast.

Asked by tfoote on 2020-03-19 13:01:41 UTC