This manual provides an overview of ROS (Robot Operating System), its tools, and related software. This manual was written for ROS version 1.2, which was released in July of 2010.

• Overview: The design goals and concepts of ROS.
• Filesystem: this section describes ROS filesystem-level concepts and tools.
• Computation Graph: this section describes the ROS runtime, aka middleware.
• Community: this section describes tools and support for the ROS community, including descriptions of various ROS code repositories, the ROS wiki, blog, and more.
• Getting Started: this section will get you started using ROS, including instructions on how to install ROS, build your own code using ROS, use the ROS command line tools, and use the ROS client libraries.

ROS grew out of design concepts by Morgan Quigley and Eric Berger at Stanford, and has since become a large project with significant support from Willow Garage, Inc. As ROS is an open-source project, many people have contributed code, feedback and patches. This manual is based on the ROS wiki, which has also had many contributions from the ROS community.