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Glossary of Robotics Terms

This glossary provides definitions for key terms and acronyms used throughout this book.

A​

  • Action (ROS): A communication mechanism in ROS for long-running, asynchronous tasks that provide feedback. It consists of a goal, feedback, and a result.
  • AMCL (Adaptive Monte Carlo Localization): A probabilistic localization system for a robot moving in 2D. It's a key component of the ROS 2 Navigation Stack (Nav2).

D​

  • Digital Twin: A virtual model of a physical object or system. It serves as a digital counterpart for simulation, testing, and monitoring.

G​

  • Gazebo: A powerful 3D robot simulator that allows for accurate and efficient testing of robots in complex environments.

I​

  • Isaac Sim: NVIDIA's scalable robotics simulation application and synthetic data generation tool, built on the Omniverse platform.

J​

  • Joint (URDF): Connects two links and defines the relative motion between them.

L​

  • Link (URDF): A rigid body of the robot.
  • LLM (Large Language Model): A type of artificial intelligence model trained on vast amounts of text data to understand and generate human-like language.

N​

  • Nav2: The ROS 2 Navigation Stack, a framework for mobile robot navigation.
  • Node (ROS): A process that performs computation. A ROS 2 application is typically composed of many nodes.

R​

  • ROS (Robot Operating System): A flexible framework for writing robot software. It is a collection of tools, libraries, and conventions that aim to simplify the task of creating complex and robust robot behavior across a wide variety of robotic platforms.

S​

  • Service (ROS): A request/response communication mechanism in ROS. It's used for synchronous, two-way communication.

T​

  • Topic (ROS): A named bus over which nodes exchange messages. Topics use a publish/subscribe communication model.

U​

  • URDF (Unified Robot Description Format): An XML file format used in ROS to describe all elements of a robot.

V​

  • VLA (Vision-Language-Action) Model: A type of AI model that connects visual perception, natural language understanding, and physical robot actions.