Robot operating system 1 is awesome.

Robot operating system 2 is also awesome.

When we started the project we were new to ros, our previous project the weedinator implemented all the network plumbing , serial communication and control systems with our own code!!!! You can see the result of our work here.

https://hackaday.io/project/53896-weedinator-2019

Ros has greatly simplified and standardised the communication between MCU control boards, various sensors, single board computers and all the other things that a robot needs to function in the real world. A robot is essentially a distributed message passing system and ros makes developing one a breeze.

We first tried the latest and greatest, ROS 2, although it seemed promising, there was a lack of coherent documentation, previous forum and support posts. This is not a technical problem or criticism of ROS 2, it's just because it's so new, a victim of it's newness!!. There are many pieces of code and packages important to robots that have yet to be ported to ROS 2. This is a monumental task so don't expect it to happen over night. Yes, we know we can run ros 1 modules on ros 2, but seeing as we were just learning, that seems a bit too star trek for back then.

We definitively think ros 2 is the future, but all the learning material and books we had all referenced ros 1 ! 

After we got into a few dead ends with ROS 2, we switched to ROS 1, and we started to make much more faster progress, just because of the wealth of support, articles , how to's , code and prebuilt packages that can be found on the internet and in book stores!!!

Ros 2 will surely get better as time goes on, but for now, we got what we wanted from ros 1.

We would like to thank everyone who has contributed to ros over the years, without the hardwork the ros community has done this project would not exist.