Porting the Robot Operating System (ROS) to FreeBSD

Trenton Schulz

Robots are an exciting technology that is continually being researched and brought closer to the mainstream. Why should the BSDs be left out of this technology? The robot operating system (ROS) is a middleware solution for communicating between different robot and sensor nodes. It is also a collection of software mostly under a BSD or BSD-compatible license. Being open source, much of it can work on FreeBSD, but there are a few missing pieces. This talk will introduce ROS, talk a little about its past history with FreeBSD, describe the missing pieces to make it work on FreeBSD, document the porting process, and offer a starting point for how to integrate ROS into the ports system.

  • slides.pdf (909 kb)