ROS Tutorials

Looking for ROS Tutorials? You’ve come to the right place.

ROS – Robot Operating System – is a middleware/framework you can use to develop any robotics application: robotic arm, mobile robot, drone, submarine, spider robot, etc.

ROS has been growing for more than 10 years and now contains everything you need to build powerful robotics applications: framework, communication between processes, tools, plug and play plugins, active and growing community.

Although ROS2 is now around the corner and becoming more and more stable every day, ROS (or ROS1) is still a viable solution for a few years.

Here are some of the topics we cover in the ROS tutorials below (non exhaustive list):

Best practices and improvement on how to write code for the ROS core concepts.
Writing code for real robots and hardware components.
ROS tools.
Explanation of core concepts through real life analogies.
Using ROS with Raspberry Pi
Migration to ROS2.
Etc.

Scroll down to see all the ROS tutorials. You can also use the search bar (top right). If you don’t find what you want, feel free to contact us, and we might create a new ROS tutorial directly from your needs!

Also, for more video tutorials you can go to the Robotics Back-End Youtube channel. There you’ll find additional ROS tutorials.

→ You want to learn ROS from scratch? Check out this complete ROS For Beginners course. With this course you will need everything you learn to get started, step by step, in a structured way, and much faster.

Create a Ros Driver Package – Package and Test Your Driver [4/4]

This tutorial is the last post [4/4] of a series on how to create a ROS driver package. Make sure you have read the introduction [1/4] of this series, as well as either the Python ROS wrapper tutorial [2/4] or the Cpp ROS wrapper tutorial [3/4]. Let’s continue with the creation of your ROS driver … Read more

Create a ROS Driver Package – Write a Cpp ROS Wrapper [3/4]

This Cpp ROS wrapper tutorial is the third post [3/4] of a series on how to create a ROS driver package. Make sure you have read the introduction [1/4] of this series, where I explain what is a ROS wrapper, and give some details about the driver we’ll use here. Part 2 shows you how … Read more

Create a ROS Driver Package – Write a Python ROS Wrapper [2/4]

This Python ROS wrapper tutorial is the second post [2/4] of a series on how to create a ROS driver package. Make sure you have read the introduction [1/4] of this series, where I explain what is a ROS wrapper, and give some details about the driver we’ll use here. Note: after reading the introduction, … Read more

Create a ROS Driver Package – Introduction & What is a ROS Wrapper [1/4]

This is the first post [1/4] of a post series on how to create a ROS driver package. So, you have a piece of hardware, you wrote a driver for it, and now you want to interface it with ROS, in order to control it from the rest of your robotics application. In this post … Read more

[ROS] How To Import a Python Module From Another Package

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to import a Python module from another package. ROS allows you to do that, and as you’ll see it’s quite simple. If you have a package which contains some common tools, helper functions, utils, or other stuff like that, you may want to be able to write the … Read more

Package Organization For a ROS Stack [Best Practices]

What is the best package organization for your ROS stack? How can your better separate your code into different packages? Although there is no right answer to this question, and everyone is free to do what they think is best, I’ll try to give here some feedback from my own experience. I have analyzed what … Read more

Make a ROS Launch Start on Boot (robot_upstart)

So, you’ve developed a nice ROS application, which can be launched with a single launch file: great! But… There is still a problem. Actually you have to manually launch this file with a command line tool (roslaunch), and you wonder how you could make your application automatically start when you boot your computer… Or your … Read more

ROS Param Command Line Tool – Practical Example (rosparam)

This tutorial is a practical guide on how to use rosparam command line tool to debug ROS Params. ROS params are really useful to launch your ROS application with different setup settings, without having to re-write and re-compile any part of your code. With the rosparam command line tool, you’ll be able to test your … Read more

Create a ROS Node Outside a Catkin Workspace

In this tutorial I’ll show you how to create a ROS node outside a catkin workspace – both for Python and Cpp. Most of the post is dedicated to linking ROS libraries to a Cpp file, because as you’ll see it’s quite simple for Python. Why would you want to create a node outside of … Read more

ROS Topic command line tools – practical example (rostopic and rosmsg)

This tutorial is a practical guide on how to use rostopic and rosmsg command line tools to debug a ROS topic. If you wonder how to monitor the publishers you’ve created, how to easily print the data from a topic, or even how to monitor a topic’s bandwidth, this post is for you. Through a … Read more