In the last Aerial ROS meeting, we had a small discussion about how to properly handle support for Aerial Vehicles, since there are so many options that people could ask support on. You can find the written out notes of that discussion here.
So the main gist is that many of those that give help, very much dislike the robotics stack exchange, due to questions being incomplete or followup questions not being answered. On the other hand, in discord questions come quick but get lost quite easily (and goes by name basis), but the helping developers can ask follow up questions quickly and debug the situation on the go. And than there are all the other channels that people ask support on as well…
I’d like to continue the discussion based on the notes, and have more input such that we can perhaps think of making a support guideperhaps a global one on the aerial robotics landscape. We had some great input already but it was a bit heavy on the developers side (mostly Ardupilot) so I’d like to widen the web here. So I have 2 questions:
1. If you are an user of an aerial vehicle and require help, on which platform do you seek it? What are the downsides of this platform?
2. If you are a developer trying to help out with user question, what would you like to see in the question, and on which platform do you prefer giving this support?
If you have already joined the real life discussion, you don’t have to add your answer here, but you can append it of course! I’d also like to hear from more people in the community that couldn’t join.
I’ve also compiled a list of the places where people ask for support (even if it is advised agains ) I’ve only focused on ardupilot/px4/crazyflie for now as those have the most ROS support. Let me know if I’m missing any channels here and I’ll update as we go.
On other channels, there are a lot of Facebook group for drone helps and specially on local languages. On ArduPilot, we got control only on one but I doubt many devs are hanging on them.
For reddit, I know
That I moderate but there are very few questions and mostly forwarded to discuss
From the old time, no idea what is happening there
From the developer perspective, the sheer amount of topics & channels are difficult to keep track of on discord. Perhaps something like having roles on discord and getting a ping from a user asking a question if the developer is assigned to that channel?
I tend to respond to the forums discussions that pop up in my email updates from dronecode more than combing through discord channels.
The one common denominator between PX4 and Ardu is Mavlink, and I think being split between the PX4 discord and Ardupilot discord on where you can get support for mavlink related questions is probably confusing to users. We get ardupilot users on the PX4 discord quite often asking Ardupilot-specific questions, so clearly there is confusion out there
There are some relevant discord communities not mentioned above (but not an exhaustive list):
DroneCAN
Cognipilot: They are basing their flight stack on zephyr (and use ROS 2 for offboard): CogniPilot · GitHub
Maybe the aerial robotics industry is due for a consolidation?
For the discord roles, I don’t know! but I’m sure that would be possible to do so. I do find giving support on discord difficult if that person and I are not online at the very same moment, so threads are easier then.
MAVlink support is indeed a bit complicated to handle as well and unfortunately there are also other powers at play that I’m not sure we’ll be able to get a suitable consensus … but let’s see!
Also I’d like to add that there are different types of questions that require different forums like:
Very high level questions: ‘I have a drone, it needs to fly from A to B while juggling watter bottles in between, how do I do this?’
Technical theory questions (usually perhaps homework related) - ’ I have a specific mass matrix here, how can I convert this to work for a 8 fixed wing vehicle?’
Advise questions: ‘What is a good platform for beginners to start on aerial robotic?’
And then the questions we want: ’ I have a pixhawk 6c, ruining Ardupilot versionX, and trying to do HITL with gazebo X and ROS x on a OS X, however I’m seeing with take off it flips. Here are logdata X’
Perhaps people can give more examples of type of questions, and expertise levels as well.
TLDR: Basically make a Discourse app or really an app for forums in general with categories like unanswered posts. If the Discourse website was as convenient and easy to use as the Discord app, I would use it more often.
I’m not an app developer, but I can see this being very important and useful way down the line.
Discord is fun and it invites beginners and for people to be casual, but that is an issue in that I see questions being asked with a lack of information and no serious effort was put forth before asking such questions. This is unlike ROS Discourse, where the nature of a technical forum often encourages people to put forth well thought out messages. Moreover, because Discord is not connected to search engines, valuable information is getting lost. This is unfortunate because historically I’ve relied on website forums even with answers from 10 years ago to solve some of the most difficult and niche issues I’ve had with a computer. Answers provided by highly advanced technology experts are worth their weight in gold.
As someone that is just coming upon Discourse, I can tell you straight away the forum is inconvenient to use (in comparison to Discord). Unlike Discord where it seems that most questions and posts are being answered, I believe I’ve read that at least 40% of the questions on ROS Discourse remain unanswered. ROS Answers needs your help
Does this still apply today? If so, I’m not sure if it’s because those are basic questions that nobody wants to answer or if the questions are so difficult that nobody can answer them. I’m also a lazy person and if I can press on my phone twice to read new messages like I can with Discord, I’d rather answer those questions.
This is sort of speaking to the broader idea of making forums more easily accessible because technical forums are often answered by professionals who have day jobs using their free time to answer. Once someone has experienced how easy and convenient it is to use a certain product, they often won’t want to go back to the previous ways.
The post about questions not getting answered is referring to ROS Answers (which has now moved to Robotics Stack Exchange), not this Discourse forum. This Discourse is used for announcements and general discussion, not for getting technical help. Robotics Stack Exchange is much better suited to getting technical help for the reasons you state. We also prefer people not to use Discord for getting technical help because of the inability to easily search it, again for the reasons you state, but we can’t completely stop people from doing so.
Thank you for clarifying my confusion. It would be interesting to compare how many questions get answered on Discord vs Robotics Stack Exchange but it would probably be very difficult to scrape/extract that kind of information. It seems that most people prefer to use Discord and I think it would probably create a lot of disagreement if people were discouraged from asking their questions on the servers.
) I’ve only focused on ardupilot/px4/crazyflie for now as those have the most ROS support. Let me know if I’m missing any channels here and I’ll update as we go.