The paper deals with the use of the Robotic-Operating-System (ROS) as an educational tool for control engineering students. This software suite, in fact, simplifies the required counnunication effort in distributed systems over networks helping; the development of learning tools in both robotic and control fields. In particular, we present a tool which allows the user to understand the tuning and the behaviour of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controllers when they are used to control first-order-plus-dead systems in distributed networks. (C) 2015, IFAC(International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.