ROS core stacks
common_msgs
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.
ros_comm
ROS communications-related packages, including core client libraries (roscpp, rospy, roslisp) and graph introspection tools (rostopic, rosnode, rosservice, rosparam).
nodelet_core
Allows one to create "nodelets" -- ROS node-like entities that run within the same process so as to avoid IPC and serialization overhead
actionlib
Provides a standardized interface for interfacing with preemptable tasks. Examples of this include moving the base to a target location, performing a laser scan and returning the resulting point cloud, detecting the handle of a door, etc.
robot_model
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.
resource_retriever
Package used to retrieve resources of different kinds, e.g. http://, file://, the ROS specific package://, etc.
bond_core
Maintains a bond (i.e. heart beat ) between ROS nodes and provides feedback when the bond is broken
class_loader
ROS-independent library for dynamic class (i.e. plugin) introspection and loading from runtime libraries
geometry
Packages for common geometric calculations including the ROS transform library, "tf". Also includes ROS bindings for "bullet" physics engine and "kdl" kinematics/dynamics package.
