Since I started working on the BETER REHAB project, I decided to use ROS as the central platform to implement all the logic for the controller of the robotic arm. This was due to two reasons: a) ROS is considered a MUST for anyone doing robotics and b) I really wanted to learn something new (those that know me can understand that this is a very big motivation for me).
ROS (standing for Robotic Operating System) is a centralised system for running multiple ’nodes’ that talk to each other using ’topics’. Each node can decide which topics is it interested in and to which topics does it contribute with information. This is a very flexible system that allows to run nodes that focus on doing one job well (following the UNIX paradigm). And since it supports different languages (e.g. C, Python), it allows bringing together the powers of different systems and combining them. And of course, there is a hugo community of researchers and hobbyists using ROS and contributing with tons of packages.