The aim of this contribution is to connect two previously separated worlds: robotic application
development with the Robot Operating System (ROS) and statistical programming with R. This
fruitful combination becomes apparent especially in the analysis and visualization of sensory data. We
therefore introduce a new language extension for ROS that allows to implement nodes in pure R. All
relevant aspects are described in a step-by-step development of a common sensor data transformation
node. This includes the reception of raw sensory data via the ROS network, message interpretation,
bag-file analysis, transformation and visualization, as well as the transmission of newly generated
messages back into the ROS network.