Packages for common geometric calculations including the ROS transform library, "tf". Also includes ROS bindings for "bullet" physics engine and "kdl" kinematics/dynamics package.
ROS communications-related packages, including core client libraries (roscpp, rospy, roslisp) and graph introspection tools (rostopic, rosnode, rosservice, rosparam).
Contains packages for modeling various aspects of robot information, specified in the Xml Robot Description Format (URDF). The core package of this stack is urdf, which parses URDF files, and constructs an object model (C++) of the robot.
Allows one to create "nodelets" -- ROS node-like entities that run within the same process so as to avoid IPC and serialization overhead
Packages related to gathering, viewing, and analyzing diagnostics data from robots.
Allows you to publish the state of a robot (i.e the position of its base and all joints) via the "tf" transform library
A ROS-independent package for logging that seamlessly pipes into rosconsole/rosout for ROS-dependent packages.
Standalone Python library for generating ROS message and service data structures for various languages
ROS-independent library for dynamic class (i.e. plugin) introspection and loading from runtime libraries
Commonly used messages in ROS. Includes messages for actions (actionlib_msgs), diagnostics (diagnostic_msgs), geometric primitives (geometry_msgs), robot navigation (nav_msgs), and common sensors (sensor_msgs), such as laser range finders, cameras, point clouds.