4. 🛠️ The C++ & OOP manual

This manual is part of the RO47003 “Robot Software Practicals” lab course, edition 2025-2026, organised by TU Delft’s Cognitive Robotics (CoR) department. The aim of these practicals is to familiarize you with key software concepts and tools that are necessary to program robots with ROS, the Robot Operating System, including Linux, Git, C++ and of course ROS itself.

These manuals are very much hands-on; you will be able to practice everything you learn immediately by doing the exercises that are contained in the text. Because the aim is to understand the tooling instead of a very specific application, we specifically encourage you to explore and try to combine the things you’ve learned in new and hopefully exciting ways!

This manual explains various important concepts of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) in C++, and assumes you are already familiar with Linux, the shell, Git.

These concepts will enable the student to write/understand simple C++ code to help their research/studies. However, this tutorial is far from being a complete reference for C++ and introduces only the basics of programming in C++.