ROS Origins
ROS was first developed in 2007 by two PhD students at Stanford University, Erin Berger and Keenan Wyrobek, as part of a personal robotics program. The academics wanted to create a unifying operating system with support for the full spectrum of robotics applications.
Using a $50,000 grant from two original members of the Apple Macintosh Team, they built the first unifying robotics OS and a hardware prototype called the PR1. After leaving Stanford to join the Willow Garage robotics research lab, they followed up with another iteration: PR2. In April 2012, Willow Garage created the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), which currently handles all new developments in ROS.
Robot Operating System (ROS) software — a suite of software libraries that help developers create robot applications — is fast becoming the dominant open-source information-exchange code in both research and industrial robots. Developed in 2007 at the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, ROS has been expanded to handle master coordination nodes; process actuator, control, and feedback data; multiplexing information; and node creation and destruction for distributed operation, even over multiple controllers.
ROS is not an operating system or software application, but a layer of middleware that can run on Java, Windows, Linux (common in research settings for its own open-source nature), and other operating systems. It communicates using TCP/IP and other protocols.
Robot Operating System (ROS): The key to the future of robotics programming