ROS 2 Documentation

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a set of software libraries and tools for building robot applications. From drivers and state-of-the-art algorithms to powerful developer tools, ROS has the open source tools you need for your next robotics project.

Since ROS was started in 2007, a lot has changed in the robotics and ROS community. The goal of the ROS 2 project is to adapt to these changes, leveraging what is great about ROS 1 and improving what isn’t.

Are you looking for documentation for a particular ROS package like MoveIt, image_proc, or octomap? Please see ROS Index or check out this index of per-package documentation.

This site contains the documentation for ROS 2. If you are looking for ROS 1 documentation, check out the ROS wiki.

If you use ROS 2 in your work, please see Citations to cite ROS 2.

Getting started

• Installation

  • Instructions to set up ROS 2 for the first time

• Tutorials

  • The best place to start for new users!

  • Hands-on sample projects that help you build a progression of necessary skills

• How-to Guides

  • Quick answers to your “How do I…?” questions without working through the Tutorials

• Concepts

  • High-level explanations of core ROS 2 concepts covered in the Tutorials

• Contact

  • Answers to your questions or a forum to start a discussion

The ROS 2 project

If you’re interested in the advancement of the ROS 2 project:

• Contributing

  • Best practices and methodology for contributing to ROS 2, as well as instructions for migrating existing ROS 1 content to ROS 2

• Distributions

  • Past, present and future ROS 2 distributions

• Features Status

  • Features in the current release

• Feature Ideas

  • Ideas for nice-to-have features that are not under active development

• Roadmap

  • Planned work for ROS 2 development

• ROSCon Talks

  • Presentations by the community on ROS 2

• Project Governance

  • Information about the ROS Technical Steering Committee, Working Groups, and upcoming events

• Marketing

  • Downloadable marketing materials

  • Information about the ROS trademark

ROS community resources

If you need help, have an idea, or would like to contribute to the project, please visit our ROS community resources.

• Official ROS Discord Channel for discussion and support (ROS 1, ROS 2)

• Robotics Stack Exchange - community Q&A website (ROS 1, ROS 2)

  • See Contact Page for more information

• ROS Discourse (ROS 1, ROS 2)

  • Forum for general discussions and announcements for the ROS community

  • See the Contact Page for more information

• ROS Index (ROS 1, ROS 2)

  • Indexed list of all packages (i.e. Python Package Index (PyPI) for ROS packages)

  • See which ROS distributions a package supports

  • Link to a package’s repository, API documentation, or website

  • Inspect a package’s license, build type, maintainers, status, and dependencies

  • Get more info for a package on Robotics Stack Exchange

• ROS resource status page (ROS 1, ROS 2)

  • Check the current status of ROS resources like Discourse or the ROS build farm.

General ROS project resources

• ROS Enhancement Proposals (REPs) (ROS 1, ROS 2)

  • Proposals for new designs and conventions

• ROS Robots (ROS 1, ROS 2)

  • Showcases robots projects from the community

  • Instructions on how to contribute a robot

• ROS Wiki (ROS 1)

  • ROS 1 documentation and user modifiable content

  • Active until at least the last ROS 1 distribution is EOL

• ROS.org (ROS 1, ROS 2)

  • ROS 1 and ROS 2 product landing page, with high-level description of ROS and links to other ROS sites

Events

• Official ROS Vimeo Channel (ROS 1, ROS 2)

  • Videos of ROSCon Talks, community and working group meetings, and project demos.

• ROSCon website (ROS 1, ROS 2)

  • ROSCon is our annual ROS developer conference.

  • This page also lists regional ROS events like ROSConJP and ROSConFr.

• Open Source Robotics Foundation official events calendar

  • This calendar is for official OSRF Events and working group meetings.

  • Submit your events here.

• Open Source Robotics Foundation community calendar

  • This calendar is for unofficial ROS community events.

  • Submit your events here .

Miscellaneous

• Purchase official ROS swag

• ROS on social media

  • @OpenRoboticsOrg and @ROSOrg on Twitter

  • Open Robotics on LinkedIn

• Visit the Open Source Robotics Foundation website

  • Tax deductible charitable donations to the Open Source Robotics Foundation can be sent via DonorBox.

Deprecated

• ROS Answers (ROS 1, ROS 2)

  • ROS Answers was the ROS community Q&A website, until August, 2023. ROS Answers is currently available as a read-only resource.

• ROS 2 Docs

  • API documentation up to and including Galactic

• ROS 2 Design

  • Early design decisions behind ROS 2 development

  • New design proposals should be submitted via ROS Enhancement Proposals (REPs)