ROS Overview

Taken from the ROS documentation page, "ROS is an open-source, meta-operating system for your robot. It provides the services you would expect from an operating system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management."

There is a lot more to ROS than is covered here, so if you are interested, read their documentation here

Typically, ROS is used to transmit lots of data between multiple machines including commands and sensor data, but for our simple example, this is how ROS interacts with the code you write

Most of the ROS-related terminal commands are taken care of by the launch file. If you'd like to get an idea of types of data being sent between your code and the simulation, try using the commands rostopic list and rosnode list. To see which topics are linked to a particular node, try rosnode info /ANodeOnTHeList. To see the actual data, try rostopic echo /ATopicOnTheList