Warning

You're reading the documentation for a version of ROS 2 that has reached its EOL (end-of-life), and is no longer officially supported. If you want up-to-date information, please have a look at Kilted.

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.

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

Other ROS resources

  • ROS Answers (ROS 1, ROS 2)

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

    • Proposals for new designs and conventions

  • 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 ROS Answers

  • ROS Prerelease (ROS 1)

    • Generates commands to emulate the ROS Buildfarm on your local machine

    • Currently only shows ROS 1 distributions

  • 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

Deprecated