

The previous ROS release is Kinetic Kame, which was released in May 2016. Most of us should be fine because our computer’s architecture should be x86_64. This installation support 3 computer architectures: x86_64, armhf, arm64. They are both supported for 5-year period until May 2023. It is released on May 23rd, 2018 and is a Long-Term Support (LTS) version, which is also the case for Ubuntu 18.04. This means other Ubuntu versions are not supported such as 16.04. ROS Melodic Morenia, is primarily targeted to Ubuntu 18.04, which is why we have this installation tutorial on 18.04. It is so popular that there are more than 50% of the robots in the world using this framework.

But it does have communication between the robot hardware and your robot program. Yes, ROS is not a traditional operating system per say. Robot Operating System (ROS) is the most popular framework to program robots.
