A new kind of documentation for ROS beginners

The amount of functionality available in ROS and the number of ROS packages continues to increase. This is a good thing, of course. However, for someone new to ROS it is hard to figure out, what functionality relevant to their robot is available and where to get further information about it.

One idea to get around this obstacle for beginners is demonstrated below. What is more natural in case of physical entities, such as robots, then to point at one of their parts and ask what it is and how to use it. Technically, this is realized with HTML image-maps and the jQuery ImageMapster plugin. The HTML and javascript is embedded from here.

Update: I created a (hopefully XSS-safe) Plugin for MoinMoin-based Wikis (such as wiki.ros.org) you can find on github.