In late 2007, researchers at Willow Garage and Stanford University started work on a new open source software platform for robotics research and development. The platform was named ROS, for Robot Operating System (http://ros.org) and quickly gained traction in the research community. It has since become a de facto standard of robotics middleware, used by thousands of roboticists around the world. After five years of research and development, we are seeing the first ROS-based commercial products in the marketplace. It's an exciting time.

This talk will explain what ROS is, and what it isn't. It will provide some context for the design of ROS, describe what people are doing with it, and outline some current and future directions for development. I will cover both technical design details and the community-centric features of the ROS ecosystem.