The thing that most people don't appreciate is that ROS was co-designed with the PR2, which had a very idiosyncratic architecture: two separate computers in the base, ethercat for comms, not at all modular, and very high end parts (for 2010ish). Most of the weirdness of ROS looks less weird in light of the design of the PR2, and most of the evolution of ROS was to get away from the PR2 model for more general platforms.

If you were in robotics prior to 2010, you probably would have used something called Player/Stage (by some of the same people who developed ROS). Believe it or not, another big motivation for ROS was solving the (many) problems that popped up as people tried to get Player/Stage running with robots like the Pioneer 3-DX.

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Joel_Mckay 4 hours ago | parent [-]

ROS is dozens of projects crammed into a single workspace. Avoiding this ecosystem will not work in your favor in the long term.

* robotic software projects are often abandoned, and only ROS keeps the driver packages working

* Yes it is terrible, but the alternatives are even worse

Almost all modern reasonably good platforms will already offer a tested ROS configuration. Even the UR5 had simulation and control options out of the box.

People can't avoid standards.. even the awful ones.. =3

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rck 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Yeah, for professional robotics you just accept that this is the world we live in. But for learning and hobbyist stuff, it's better to play with simple hardware and build the things that ROS is ultimately abstracting over before you try to pick up ROS.

I've seen people get sucked into ROS + simulation who end up never touching real robots. Which is fine if that's what you want to play with, but it's debatable if "ROS + sim" alone is even "robotics."

	▲	Joel_Mckay 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I usually recommend building the Arduino turtle-bot first, try the maze solver with the classic wavefront algorithm, and then a ROS Arduino setup tutorial. Also not a fan of simulators for simple platforms, as a lot of stuff breaks when the environment is chaotic. =3