It Takes a Village to Build a Robot: An Empirical Study of The ROS Ecosystem - Replication Package

Over the past eleven years, the Robot Operating System (ROS), has grown from a small research project into the most popular framework for robotics development. Composed of packages released on the Rosdistro package manager, ROS aims to simplify development by providing reusable libraries, tools and conventions for building a robot. Still, developing a complete robot is a difficult task that involves bridging many technical disciplines. Experts who create computer vision packages, for instance, may need to rely on software designed by mechanical engineers to implement motor control. As building a robot requires domain expertise in software, mechanical, and electrical engineering, as well as artificial intelligence and robotics, ROS faces knowledge based barriers to collaboration. In this paper, we examine how the necessity of domain specific knowledge impacts the open source collaboration model. We create a comprehensive corpus of package metadata and dependencies over three years in the ROS ecosystem, analyze how collaboration is structured, and study the dependency network evolution. We find that the most widely used ROS packages belong to a small cluster of foundational working groups (FWGs), each organized around a different domain in robotics. We show that the FWGs are growing at a slower rate than the rest of the ecosystem, in terms of their membership and number of packages, yet the number of dependencies on FWGs is increasing at a faster rate. In addition, we mined all ROS packages on GitHub, and showed that 82% rely exclusively on functionality provided by FWGs. Finally, we investigate these highly influential groups and describe the unique model of collaboration they support in ROS.过去十一年间，机器人操作系统（Robot Operating System，ROS）已从一项小型研究项目成长为最受欢迎的机器人开发框架。该系统依托Rosdistro包管理器发布的一系列软件包构建而成，旨在通过提供可复用的库、工具与开发规范，简化机器人开发流程。尽管如此，开发完整的机器人系统仍是一项艰巨任务，需要横跨多门技术学科。例如，开发计算机视觉软件包的专家，可能需要依赖机械工程师开发的软件来实现电机控制。由于机器人开发需要软件工程、机械工程、电气工程以及人工智能与机器人学等多领域的专业知识，ROS在协作过程中面临着基于领域知识的准入壁垒。在本研究中，我们探讨了领域特定知识的必要性如何影响开源协作模式。我们构建了ROS生态系统中三年跨度的全面软件包元数据与依赖关系语料库，分析了协作的组织结构，并研究了依赖网络的演化历程。我们发现，使用最广泛的ROS软件包隶属于少数几个基础工作组（Foundational Working Groups，FWGs），每个工作组围绕机器人学的一个细分领域开展工作。研究表明，从成员规模与软件包数量来看，FWGs的增长速度均慢于生态系统的其余部分，但针对FWGs的依赖数量正以更快的速度增长。此外，我们挖掘了GitHub平台上的所有ROS软件包，结果显示82%的软件包仅依赖FWGs提供的功能。最后，我们对这些极具影响力的工作组展开了调研，并阐述了它们在ROS生态中支撑的独特协作模式。