ROS2 Beginner's Guide: Core Concepts, Differences from ROS1, and Version Selection

With the era of intelligent robotics in full swing—from performing robots on China's Spring Festival Gala stage to robotic vacuums in our homes—intelligent robots have permeated every aspect of our lives. Behind these intelligent robots lies a critical software development platform: ROS2 (Robot Operating System 2). This article provides a comprehensive overview of ROS2's core concepts, its differences from ROS1, and version selection strategies, laying a solid foundation for getting started with robotics development.

The Era of Intelligent Robotics Has Arrived

Since the 1970s and 1980s, driven by advances in computer technology, sensor technology, electronics, and other emerging technologies, robotics has entered a golden age of rapid development. Robotics has expanded from traditional industrial manufacturing into home services, medical care, education and entertainment, rescue and exploration, military applications, and many more fields.

The Leap from Traditional Robots to Intelligent Robots

Traditional robots in the industrial sector—such as robotic arms in automobile manufacturing plants—can only execute pre-programmed instructions one by one and fundamentally lack the ability to think independently. Today's intelligent robots are fundamentally different:

• Home Services: Robotic vacuums can autonomously explore home environments, build maps, and avoid obstacles
• Medical Care: Surgical robots have begun assisting doctors in performing precision surgeries
• Rescue and Exploration: Robots can venture into hazardous areas for exploration, preventing human casualties
• Military Applications: Drones can now carry out complex military missions

Artificial Intelligence Gives Robots a "Brain"

With the explosive growth of artificial intelligence, AIGC technologies such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and ERNIE Bot continue to emerge, granting robots genuine "thinking ability." The combination of AI and robotics has transformed robots from simple command executors into intelligent agents capable of autonomous decision-making and flexible responses. The scale of this revolution is comparable to how the internet and mobile internet once disrupted human life.

Notably, the deep integration of AIGC technology with robotics is giving rise to "Embodied Intelligence"—a cutting-edge research direction. Embodied intelligence emphasizes that AI should not only exist in digital space but must also interact with, perceive, and learn from the real world through a physical body. Large Language Models (LLMs) are being introduced into the robot task planning layer, enabling robots to understand natural language commands and decompose them into executable action sequences. For example, you only need to tell a robot "put the cup on the table in the kitchen," and it can autonomously plan a path, identify objects, and complete the task. With its modular architecture and standardized interfaces, ROS2 serves as the ideal middleware connecting AI reasoning modules with low-level hardware control, making it a crucial technical foundation for bringing embodied intelligence to reality.

What Is ROS2? It's Not Actually an Operating System

In intelligent robot development, hardware is the robot's body, while software gives it a soul. At the software level, the most critical technology is ROS (Robot Operating System).

The True Definition of ROS: A Software Development Kit

ROS is an open-source software development kit for building robot applications, consisting of a collection of software libraries and tools. There's a very important misconception that needs to be clarified:

Although the literal meaning of ROS is "Robot Operating System"