2024 ROS Metrics Report
Download the full metrics report here: 2024 ROS Metrics Report.pdf (2.9 MB)
(For reference, the 2023 report is available here)
Once a year we check up on the general health, well-being, and growth of the ROS community by collecting metrics from the various ROS projects and services in a report. The goal of this metrics report is to give the community a snapshot of the growth and composition of the ROS community. As part of our ongoing quest to better understand the ROS community this year we’re publishing some basic Github contribution metrics (total contributors, total pull requests, etc).
We take the privacy of the ROS community seriously, and we try to minimize the collection of user data, which makes constructing this report difficult. We lean heavily on proxy measurements to estimate the overall growth and health of the community. This year the metrics report consists of aggregate statistics from various ROS and Gazebo services, including:
- ROS Discourse
- Robotics Stack Exchange
- The ROS Wiki
- Google Analytics attached to various ROS websites
- ROS Index
- ROS Download Data
- Github Contributions
- Google Scholar Citations
Now, let’s get to the good news! We are happy to report that the ROS community is healthy, growing, and that we are over the hump on the ROS 2 transition! Just shy of 72% of all downloads from our servers are now ROS 2 as of October 2024. ROS 2 questions also make up 93% of ROS questions asked on Robotics Stack Exchange! ROS 2 Humble had nearly twice as many downloads in October 2024 as ROS 1 Noetic (39.39% vs 22.18%).
This year we’ve added some new metrics to help us better understand our contributor community. For the ROS 2, Gazebo, and Open-RMF Github projects we calculated basic metrics about code contributions and contributors. For each of these three organizations the total number of contributors was up for the year (3.2% for ROS, 30.59% for Gazebo, and 23.08% for Open-RMF) while the total number of pull requests was a mixed bag (up 20% for ROS, down 1% for Gazebo, and up 6.87% for Open-RMF). It is worth noting that these numbers only reflect our core project Github repositories, and things like ROS packages, and ROS distro reside outside the scope of these Github projects. Fun fact: for the past two years running the ros2 documentation repository has had the most number of pull requests, by almost 3x the next most active repository (ROSBag2). We really are working hard to make the ROS documentation better!
On the Gazebo front about 3.5 million Gazebo packages were downloaded in December of 2024, that would put us at about 42 million Gazebo package downloads per year. Unfortunately, how that number precisely breaks down between Gazebo versions is a bit difficult to determine. By the raw numbers modern Gazebo makes up a whopping 86.6% of all Gazebo downloads, but we noticed a lot of mirroring behavior on our servers by multiple IP addresses, which may skew these results.
This year, most of the ROS metrics we checked have demonstrated fairly substantial growth, usually in the range of 10-20%. However, certain parts of the ROS community are shrinking, and in some cases that’s a good thing! For example, ROS Wiki page views are down 5% and the wiki barely grew in 2024. This is a good thing, ROS 1 and the ROS 1 Wiki goes end of life in about three months!
ROS downloads were also down slightly for 2024, about 3% from last year. We suspect that ROS Docker downloads are starting to significantly outpace ROS binary downloads. We’ve reached out to DockerHub in the past to see if we can get granular DockerHub statistics, but so far we’ve been unsuccessful (if you can help here please reach out).
Similarly, ROS Discourse participation numbers are down, or flat on the year. However, ROS Discourse page views are up by 18% on the year, and the total number of ROS Discourse users has increased by about 2600 users. People are obviously coming to ROS Discourse to get their news, but they don’t seem too interested in using the platform for discussion. One theory we have for this is that the ORSF Discord, OSRA Slack servers, and PMC meetings are absorbing some of the regular discussion that used to happen on Discourse.
Here are some highlights from the report that illustrate how the ROS community is growing.
- 531,452,142 ROS packages were downloaded in 2024 (down about 3%, but we think this is a combination of Docker and lower sync frequencies).
- Docs.ros.org users increased by 23.75%.
- ROS Discourse posts have decreased by about 11% but page views are up by 18%
- 4,842 questions were asked on Robotics Stack Exchange that’s up over 170% over last year!
- 93% of Robotics Stack Exchange questions were about ROS 2.
- Our ROS LinkedIn account grew by 43% to over 160,000 followers.
- ROS Melodic was just 2.32% of package downloads in October 2024.
- ROS 2 Humble has nearly twice as many downloads as Noetic (22% versus 40%)!
- ROS 2 now makes up 72% of ROS Downloads.
- 13,335 academic citations of the original ROS paper and over 1,016 citations of our ROS 2 paper
- There are over 1250 companies using ROS (that we know of).
- A large percentage of our Gazebo downloads are now modern Gazebo.
We’ve included exports of a few key slides that may be useful to everyone. Please feel free to use these slides however you see fit.
We would love to hear what you think, what metrics should be included next year? Keep in mind that we don’t track our users, which makes the use of more traditional telemetry tools difficult.