Inquiring the Robot Operating System Community on the State of Adoption of the ROS 2 Robotics Middleware
International
Journal of Intelligent Robotics and Applications, Springer, 9, 454–479, 2025. DOI: 10.1007/s41315-024-00393-4
The robot
operating system (ROS) is a well-established and popular open-source robotics
middleware used for rapid prototyping of robotic applications. However, ROS has
several known weaknesses, such as lack of support for real-time systems and
limitations in fully distributed deployments with multiple robots. To address
these weaknesses, ROS underwent a major update and the first version of ROS 2
was released back in 2015, being lingeringly adopted by the community in recent
years. Yet, long-term support for ROS 1 will come to an end on May 2025. As
such, it is more important than ever to analyze and explore the features of ROS
2, and understand its technological readiness. This work focuses on the state
of adoption of ROS 2. Specifically, the article presents a user experience
questionnaire targeting the ROS community to understand the more eminent needs
with respect to ROS 2, determine the current levels of adoption, and identify
what is holding the community back from migrating their ROS 1 applications to
ROS 2. Results with more than 100 participants from around the world show that
the community is aware of ROS 2 and the middleware is addressing most user
expectations. We unveil the main reasons given for not migrating to ROS 2,
further understand the community’s views on ROS 2, and identify what is missing
to anticipate ROS 1 users migrating to ROS 2 and make ROS 2 widely adopted.
Moreover, we gather important impressions on the appropriateness of ROS 2 for
multi-robot system use cases.
Keywords ─ Robotics middleware; Robot
Operating System (ROS); ROS 2 adoption; user experience questionnaire;
transition from ROS 1 to ROS 2.
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@ARTICLE{Portugal_Rocha_25,
AUTHOR = "Portugal, D. and Rocha, R. P. and Castilho, J.",
TITLE = "Inquiring the robot operating system community on the state of adoption of the ROS 2 robotics middleware",
JOURNAL = "International Journal of Intelligent Robotics and Applications",
VOLUME = "9",
YEAR = "2025",
PAGES = "454–479",
PUBLISHER = "Springer",
DOI = "10.1007/s41315-024-00393-4"
}
Last
update: 02/01/2025
Copyright ©
2025 Rui P. Rocha, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering,