The complexity of today's robot control systems implies difficulty in
developing them efficiently and reliably. Systems engineering (SE) and
frameworks come to help. The framework metamodels are needed to support the
standardisation and correctness of the created application models. Although the
use of frameworks is widespread nowadays, for the most popular of them, Robot
Operating System (ROS) version 1, a contemporary metamodel, has been missing so
far. This article proposes a new metamodel for ROS (MeROS), which addresses
both the running system and developer workspace. For compatibility with the
latest versions of ROS 1, the metamodel includes the latest ROS 1 concepts such
as nodelet, action, and metapackage. An essential addition to the original ROS
concepts is the grouping concepts, which provide an opportunity to illustrate
the decomposition of the system, as well as varying degrees of detail in its
presentation. The metamodel is derived from the requirements and then verified
on the practical example of the Rico assistive robot. The matter is described
in the SysML language, supported by standard development tools to conduct
projects in the spirit of SE