2022 ROS 2 metrics report

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The number of users in the ROS community, for all versions, has shown a steady increase since 2008. | Credit: ros.org

The ROS team recently published statistics from 2022, and there were a few notable trends worth noting:

• ROS is gaining in popularity as an operating system for robotics. Both the number of commercial solutions using ROS as well as new projects based on ROS increased in 2022. There are currently more than 740 commercial robots using ROS.
• ROS 2 officially launched in 2022, and the statistics on the various ROS sites show a growing migration from ROS 1 to ROS 2. The total number of ROS packages downloaded increased by 7.45%. ROS 2 accounted for 39.82% of all ROS downloads in 2022. ROS 2 had a 54.46% increase in package downloads YoY.
• There were 501,333,806 total deb downloads in 2022.
• An incredible 173.35 terabytes of ROS packages were served from OSUOSL.

ROS support channels are changing

ROS has a number of resources available for community support and documentation. The solution is open source and it’s the ROS community that helps to support new users and tackle difficult application questions.

ROS started with a Wiki, but in 2022, the Wiki lost users and traffic while the ROS docs site gained more than 56k new users. Overall, total users were up 33% year-over-year.

It has to be noted that the ROS Wiki only includes ROS 1 documentation while the newer ROS docs site includes the documentation for the most recent versions of both ROS 1 and ROS 2. This helps to explain the change in documentation usage patterns.

For community support, more users seem to be moving to the ROS Discourse resource as Discourse users are up +9.8% since 2021, while ROS Answers users are down -11.19%.

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A short list of ROS resources

Start here: ROS index: https://index.ros.org/ 

ROS Wiki page: https://wiki.ros.org/ 

ROS doc site: http://docs.ros.org/ 

ROS Discourse server: https://discourse.ros.org/ 

ROS answers: https://answers.ros.org/questions/ 

ROS packages download: http://packages.ros.org/

For complete details about the data cited in this article, be sure to check out the 2022 ROS metrics report.