As you can see, communicating between different aspects of our project can be challenging. You are probably used to using an operating system that provides you with much of the basic functionality that you need for your computer use. In this section I'm going to introduce you to a special operating system that is designed specifically for use with robotics projects, the Robot Operating System (ROS). This operating system sits on top of Linux and provides some interesting functionality.

ROS is fortunately free and open source. It is a very complex set of functionalities, but if you spend some time learning it, you can start using some of the most comprehensive functionality being developed in robotics research today.

To install ROS for the BeagleBone Black, go to http://wiki.ros.org/groovy/Installation/UbuntuARM. This gives you a step-by-step set of instructions to download and install the ROS onto your BeagleBone Black. Then also select Ubuntu on ARM, which is the architecture of your BeagleBone Black, and then select the appropriate version for the version of Ubuntu you are running. If you are using Ubuntu 12.04, for example, you'll want to select the 12.04 Precise armhf directions. Armhf is the architecture we are using, the ARM processor and hard float, which is what our processor supports.

Once installed, you can go through the tutorials; they will introduce you to the features of ROS and how to use it in our robotics projects. There are some limitations to using ROS on the BeagleBone Black; some of the nice graphical tools for monitoring and controlling the system are not available. However, it does provide a systematic way of configuring and communicating between multiple features of your robot running in different programs. It even comes with some programs that implement some interesting vision and motor control capabilities.