(Disclaimer: I contribute to ROS in my day job) As someone who has been working on ROS for a living and spent the past 3 years in research labs ROS does seem ve

(Disclaimer: I contribute to ROS in my day job) As someone who has been working on ROS for a living and spent the past 3 years in research labs ROS does seem very scary. The ROS website itself is in need of an overhaul with better tutorials. Part of the reason why a beginner coming in may also get lost is that there are many very advanced tools and libraries for concepts which are foreign to software engineers. Take the TF library for instance which you mention - its goal is to calculate transforms, but unless you are deep into robotics you may find it difficult to understand why it is used in so many places. The fact is ROS provides an extremely comprehensive set of APIs, but why those APIs are useful is not immdiately clear unless you actually build robots. If you are an absolute beginner here are some tips: The core of ros is a message bus. Its aim is to provide a messaging layer, not unlike what one would get with mqtt. However, ros's message bus has been designed to be distributed and quite frankly has better performance than mqtt on an edge device. It also has a good set of tools that allows you to visualize errors. Each ros program is called a node. Think of it like microservices. Why do we do this? Well first of all it provides modularity so we can swap out components. It also provides a certain amount of resiliency to your robot. So suppose one node on your robot dies, the whole thing will not come crashing down. In addition to the ros messaging bus, there are tools like rosbag, which provides users with a super simple way to log sensor data and share it across runs. There are also tools like rviz which help you visuallize the robot's data. These tools are very useful when you are dealing with 3D data coming from LiDARs or depth cameras, however it probably is not needed when your robot is a simple line follower. Once your familiar with these you should look at the TF library which deals with transforms. Transforms are central to robotics however it does take time to get a good grasp on them. At this point I recommend you take some MOOC to help fill the gap in knowledge. MoveIT! is designed for robots with multiple joints like robot arms. For wheeled robots and obstacle avoidance you probably want to look at move_base and nav2 packages. Movebase is the old package for obstacle avoidance on ground robots. It is a bit of a pain to work with. I strongly recommend you use Nav2 instead which is far superior and better documented and the successor to move_base. tl; dr: Robotics is hard. There is no royal road to it.