Programming Robots with ROS: A Practical Introduction to the Robot Operating System

Morgan is a PhD Candidate in Computer Science at Stanford. Previously, he earned a BS Computer Science and BA Music at Brigham Young University in 2005. Morgan developed one of the ancestors of the Robot Operating System (ROS) as part of the Stanford AI Robot (STAIR) project in 2006-2007. He later founded ROS with Eric Berger, Ken Conley, and Brian Gerkey due to mutual interest and shared need for a collaboration-friendly robot software framework. Interests include robot software systems, open-source software and firmware, embedded systems design, mechatronics, and sensor design. Brian Gerkey is Director of Open Source Development at Willow Garage. Before joining Willow Garage, he was a Computer Scientist in the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI, and before that, a postdoc in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Stanford University. Prior to working on ROS, Brian was founder and co-lead developer on the open source Player Project (http:/ /playerstage.sf.net), which still produces one of the most widely-used software platforms for robotics research and education. For his work on Player and ROS, Brian was named one of the top 35 innovators under 35 (TR35) by the MIT Technology Review in 2011. Brian has presented at numerous robotics conferences over the last 10 years; recently he was a keynote speaker at SIMPAR 2010, and gave tech talks at Google I/O 2011 at OSCON 2011. Bill Smart is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. His research interests span the areas of mobile robotics, machine learning, human-robot interaction, and brain-computer interfaces. He directs the Media and Machines Laboratory, a multi-disciplinary group conducting research into mobile robotics, computer vision, human-machine interaction, and computer graphics. He has been writing software for robots for over two decades, and performing research and development into robot software architectures for over 15 years. At Washington University, he primarily teaches robotics, computer programming, and software engineering classes at both the undergraduate and graduate level. He has been a ROS user since the beginning, and was involved in some of the early planning workshops for the system. Recently, he spent a 15-month sabbatical at Willow Garage, Inc., developing software for PR2 robots and enjoying the weather in California