ROS metrics show growing robotics community

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ROS Software can be used for path planning with dynamic obstacles. | Source: Open Robotics, Joshua Ellingson

Almost 600 million Debs were downloaded from ROS (Robot Operating Software from Open Robotics) between July 2020 and July 2021, according ROS’ 2021 Metrics Report, a 50% increase from last year.

ROS is an open source development kit for robotics applications. It offers a standard, royalty-free, software platform for robotics developers. Its recent statistics report show a rapidly growing ROS community.

While ROS’ yearly metrics reports typically come out in September or October, they were delayed until February this year, allowing ROS to provide full year values for certain metrics. ROS gathers its data from various ROS services, like ROS Discourse and ROS Wiki, and uses it to create aggregate statistics. The report was released on ROS Discourse.

“The goal of pulling these numbers is to give the community a snapshot of the size of the ROS user base and how fast it is growing. I am happy to report that the ROS community is strong, healthy, and growing,” Katherine Scott, developer advocate for Open Robotics, wrote. “In all but a few metrics the ROS community is growing and for many metrics the numbers almost doubled year over year.”

ROS saw growth in many aspects in the last year. For example, ROS was cited in 9,260 research articles, up 25% from 7,410 in 2020. In July 2021, 789,956 unique visitors downloaded ROS, up 10.6% from July 2020, when 714,247 unique visitors downloaded ROS.

Similarly, ROS saw growth in many of its sites. ROS Answers visitors grew by 11.41% from 140,508 to 156,533 and ROS Discourse visitors grew by 31.07% from 21,000 to 27,525.

The robotics industry as a whole saw growth in 2021. According to the Association for Advancing Automation (A3), sales of industrial robots in North America hit a new high, with 39,708 units sold. Those sales were valued at $2 billion.

Brian Gerkey, co-founder and CEO of Open Robotics, is keynoting our Robotics Summit & Expo, which takes place May 10-11 in Boston.