You're reading the documentation for an older, but still supported, version of ROS 2. For information on the latest version, please have a look at Galactic.

Docs Guide

This guide explains the ROS 1 and ROS 2 documentation infrastructure. It is helpful in understanding where specific resources live, how to ask questions, and which sites are maintained.

ROS Answers

Purpose

A Q&A community website for ROS 1 and 2 that is similar to Stack Exchange.

References

See the Contact Page for how to use ROS Answers.

ROS Design

Purpose

A place that documents many of the early ROS 2 design decisions.

Notes

ROS Enhancement Proposals (REPs) are preferable to new documents in ROS Design.

ROS Discourse

Purpose

A forum for general discussions and announcements for the ROS community.

References

See the Contact Page for more information on discussions on ROS Discourse.

ROS Docs (this site)

Purpose
  • ROS 1 and ROS 2 API documentation

  • ROS 2 core documentation, such as installation instructions, tutorials, guides, roadmap, etc.

ROS Enhancement Proposals (REPs)

Purpose

A place for ROS 1 and ROS 2 design and conventions.

Notes

REPs are preferable to ROS Design, since they have a more established review process.

ROS Index

Purpose

An indexed list of all packages that links to additional information.

Notes

ROS Index is useful for

  • Seeing which ROS distributions a package supports (ROS 1 and ROS 2)

  • Linking to a packages repository, API documentation, or website

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

  • Finding questions on ROS Answers that involve the package

You can think of ROS 2 index as something similar to the Python Package Index (PyPi) for ROS packages.

ROS Prerelease

Purpose

A website that helps you generate commands to emulate the ROS Buildfarm on your local machine.

Notes

Currently, the frontend of this site only shows ROS 1 distributions.

ROS Robots

Purpose

A place to showcase robots that use ROS 1 or ROS 2.

Notes

Robots on this page are community contributed, see the site for instructions on how to contribute a robot.

ROS Wiki

Purpose

ROS 1 documentation and user modifiable content.

Notes
  • We are not using the wiki for ROS 2 because of the overhead involved in moderating the wiki. The wiki’s functionality for ROS 2 will be replaced by ROS Docs (this site), ROS Index, ROS Discourse, and ROS Answers

  • The wiki will active until at least the last ROS 1 distribution is EOL.

ROS.org

Purpose

The ROS 1 and ROS 2 product landing page, which gives a high-level description of ROS and links to other ROS sites.

Deprecated

ROS 2 Docs

ROS 2 docs hosts API documentation for distributions up to and including Galactic. From Humble and onwards, API documentation will be hosted on ROS Docs (this site).