Despite its name, the Robot Operating System (ROS) is not an operating system; it is a software development kit (SDK) that provides building blocks for robotic applications. One of the main goals of ROS is to present a common API that abstracts away the details of particular hardware drivers or algorithms to make development easier; developers can focus on what a robot should do rather than the low-level details of specific controllers. The latest release of ROS, Kilted Kaiju, features improvements to the middleware layer that is used to deliver data between components.