Kinetic Kame Officially End of Life

[tfoote]

With the final sync out Kinetic Kame is now officially EOL.

As our second LTS release Kinetic Kame has grown to be our largest rosdistro with 1233 repositories over the last 5 years!

See here on metrics.ros.org for an interactive version.

This rosdistro has helped grow the community demonstrating the value to the community of the LTS releases with the majority of monthly downloads from as early as July 2017 until as last as January 2020.

See here at metrics.ros.org for an interactive version. More metrics can be found in our annual Metrics reports.

Users

Twitter users are replying to this post with cool things that they have done with Kinetic Feel free to add your replies there or reply here too with pictures of your robots that ran Kinetic any time in the last 5 years.

Support and Migration

To examine how the community was moving away from Kinetic, we pulled the rosdistro download statistics for each ROS distro back in March of 2021. Between March 2020 and March 2021 ROS Kinetic went from 35% of ROS downloads to less 18% of all downloads. As the end of life date for Kinetic approached the community rapidly started upgrading to Melodic, Noetic, and ROS 2. For those who have not yet upgraded there is still hope! Recently, Open Robotics partnered with Canonical to provide extended security maintenance for ROS. This new paid service should make it easier for enterprise ROS users to upgrade their ROS deployments when it makes the most sense for their business. For those of you still working with Kinetic who wish to upgrade to a newer version of ROS 1, you can find guides for Melodic and Noetic on the ROS 1 wiki. If you are really ambitious here are some guides for ROS 2 migration, but we suggest you upgrade to Noetic first.

Kinetic Release Statistics

It was active for 1920 days, with the process starting all the way back in February of 2016, of which there were changes on 1239 of those which is 64.53% There were a total of 5319 commits averaging 4.3 per active day.

The contributions came from people at all hours of every day over the course of the distribution.

Contributors came from 19 different timezones helping make us active all the time.

We had 7 contributors with over 100 contributions and 331 contributors with at least two contributions. And an average of 10.3 commits per author.

Contributing Maintainers

Maintaining all these packages has been a great community effort with 515 people making contributions to the kinetic distribution file. This doesn’t count second and third maintainers and contributors who have also contributed. All of your contributions are greatly appreciated!

Here’s a list of all committers to the kinetic rosdistro file:

7675t, AAlon, Aarón, Abby Xu, Abhishek Padalkar, Abraham Monrroy Cano, Achille Verheye, Adam Allevato, Adi Singh, Administrator, Adnan Ademovic, Akiyoshi Ochiai, Ákos Milánkovich, Alessandro Tondo, Alexander Gutenkunst, Alexander Rössler, Alexander Stumpf, Alexander Tiderko, Alexander Winkler, Alexis Maldonado, Alex Moriarty, alexv, AlexV, AliquesTomas, Alireza, amineHorseman, Anas, andreasgustavsson, Andreas ten Pas, andrefleitao, AndyZe, Andy Zelenak, AndyZelenak, Angel Merino, Anja Sheppard, Ankit Dhall, Anqi Xu, Antti Kolu, apalomino-edgebrain, appie-17, archielee, Armin Hornung, Arne Hitzmann, artivis, as-snehagn, Atsushi Watanabe, Austin, AustinDeric, b2256, Bence Magyar, Benjamin Leclerc, Benjamin Yahari, benjayah, Błażej Sowa, B.N.Berrevoets, Brandon Alexander, Brenden Gibbons, brenden-square, Brennan Cain, Brian Bingham, Bryce Willey, BuildTools, carlos3dx, Carlos Aguero, Carlos Agüero, Carlos Villar, carnegieroboticsllc, Carnegie Robotics LLC, Chad Attermann, Chambana, chapulina, Chittaranjan Swaminathan, Chittaranjan Swaminathan Srinivas, Chris I-B, Chris Lalancette, Chris Thierauf, Christian, Christian Arndt, Christian Henkel, Christian Rauch, Christopher Berner, Christoph Rösmann, Christos Zalidis, Claudio Bandera, cogniteam, csherstan, ct2034, cwbollinger, Daisuke NAKAMICHI, Daisuke Sato, Damjan Miklic, Daniel Koch, Daniel Saier, danielsnider, Daniel Snider ツ, Daniel Stonier, danielwang, Danylo Malyuta, Dave Coleman, Dave Feil-Seifer, david0429, davide, Davide Conzon, Davide Faconti, David Feil-Seifer, David Fischinger, David Kent, David Mansolino, David Uhm, David V. Lu, David V. Lu!!, Dejan Pangercic, Denis Štogl, Devin Bonnie, dhood, Diogo Almeida, Dirk Thomas, Dmitry Kartashov, doosan robotics ros master, Dorian Scholz, doronhi, Dr. Konstantin Schauwecker, Ed Venator, Edward Venator, Elcin Erdogan, Emerson Knapp, Enrique Fernandez, Enrique Fernández Perdomo, eric, Erwan Cabon, Esteve Fernandez, Eurecat Robotic Lab, Evan Flynn, Fabien Spindler, fannibal, Felix Endres, Felix Exner, Felix Marek, Felix Mauch, Felix Messmer, Felix Ruess, flg-pb, Florian Walch, Florian Weisshardt, fmessmer, fmina, Foley, Fotios Papadopoulos, fpasch, FProgrammerLIU, Francisco, Francis Colas, Frantisek Durovsky, fsuarez6, Furushchev, garrenhendricks, Garren Hendricks, gavanderhoorn, G.A. vd. Hoorn, Gayane Kazhoyan, GDwag, Geoffrey Biggs, geoffviola, Geoff Viola, Georg Bartels, George Stavrinos, Georgia Blanco-Litchfield, Gérald Lelong, Gilbert Groten, guykhazma, Hadi Tabatabaee, Hadrien Pomès, HakanGENCTURK, Hanzhe Teng, harjeb, Hassan Umari, Heiko Hirschmueller, higuchish, hi-kondo, Hiroki Matsui, hslusarek, HUAJIEIMI, Hunter Allen, Hunter L. Allen, iamtesch, Ian McMahon, icarpis, icolwell-as, Ignacio Carlucho, Immanuel Martini, Ines Lara Sicilia, Ingo Lütkebohle, injones, ipa-fxm, ipa-jcl, ipa-nhg, Isaac I.Y. Saito, Itay Carpis, Jack, jack-digilabs, Jackie Kay, Jack Kilian, Jack O’Quin, Jacob Perron, Jaehyun Shim, Jafar Abdi, Jariullah Safi, jariza, Jarvis Schultz, Javier Perez, Jean-Philippe Roberge, JeehoonYang, jelfring, Jeremie Deray, Jeroen, Jesse Ikawa, jfkeller, Jihoon Lee, Jim Vaughan, Jim Whitfield, Jiri Horner, jiuyewxy, jlack1987, Joachim Schleicher, João Quintas, johannagleichauf, Johannes Meyer, Jonathan Binney, Jonathan Bohren, Jonathan Hechtbauer, Jon Binney, Jordan Lack, Jorge Arino, Jorge Beltrán de la Cita, Jorge Santos Simón, Jose Luis Blanco, Jose Luis Blanco Claraco, Jose Luis Blanco-Claraco, Jose-Luis Blanco-Claraco, Jose Luis Rivero, Joshua Whitley, jschleicher, Juan Ignacio Ubeira, Julian Cerruti, Junya Hayashi, Justin Huang, Kabaradjian PL, Karsten Knese, Kei Okada, Kentaro Wada, Kevin Hallenbeck, kintzhao, Kirill Krinkin, kmhallen, Konstantin Schauwecker, kostech, KristofRobot, lebarsfa, Lennart Haller, Lennart Puck, livox, lixianqiang, Lorenz Halt, Loy, lth, Lucas Casanova, Lucas Nogueira, Lucid One, Ludovic Delval, Luetkebohle Ingo (CR/AEX3), Mabel Zhang, Maciej Zurad, Maciej Żurad, Mads Vainø Baatrup, Mani Monajjemi, mapseamoff, marbosjo, Marc Alban, Marc Bosch-Jorge, MarcoStb1993, Marcus A Johansson, Maria, Mark D Horn, Mark Horn, Mark Moll, Mark Naeem, Marko Bjelonic, Markus Bader, Markus Bader @ Marvin, Markus Bader @ munin, Markus Bader @ virtual box, Markus Eich, Martin Guenther, Martin Günther, Martin Pecka, Masaya Kataoka, Matej Sladek, Mathias Lüdtke, matlabbe, Matt Curfman, Matthias Gruhler, Matt Vollrath, Maxime Busy, max@rosi, Max Schwarz, maxsvetlik, Max Svetlik, methylDragon, Miaofei, Miaofei Mei, michael1309, Michael Carroll, Michael Ferguson, Michael Hosmar, Michael Jeronimo, Michael Lehning, Michael X. Grey, Michał Drwięga, Micho Radovnikovich, Mikael Arguedas, Mike Karamousadakis, Mike Purvis, Mingfei, Miquel Massot, M. M, Morgan Quigley, Mori, Mub, Musa Morena Marcusso Manhães, Nancy Seckel, Naoki Mizuno, Natalia Lyubova, Nathan, NCS 3D Sensing Team, neckutrek, neka-nat, nekanat, Nelapsi, Nick Burek, Nick Fragale, Nick Hawes, Nick Lamprianidis, Nick Sullivan, Nikhil Khedekar, Niklas Yann Wettengel, nlyubova, Noam C. Golombek, NovAtel Applications Engineering, nowittyusername, nrgadmin, nrotella-ainstein, ob-tim-liu, Okan Aşık, Olivier Michel, OSE ROS Support, padiln, Paloma Carrasco Fernández, Pascal Becker, Patrick Beeson, Paul Bovbel, Paul Mathieu, PedroDesRobots, Perrine Aguiar, Peter Fankhauser, Péter Fankhauser, Peter Weissig, Philipp Schillinger, Philipp Tenbrock, pierre-louis.k, pietrocolombo, P. J. Reed, Playfish, pl-kabaradjian, Praveen Palanisamy, puck-fzi, Pushkal Katara, pyo, Pyo, qinyunchuan, Quentin Torgerson, Ragha Prasad, randoms, Reagan Lopez, Reed Hedges, Rein Appeldoorn, Richard Bormann, Rik, Rinda Gunjala, Robert Haschke, Roberto Martin-Martin, Roberto Martín-Martín, RoboHacker, RoboTiCan, Rohan Agrawal, Romain Reignier, Roman Navarro Garcia, Ronald Ensing, Rousseau Vincent, Ruben Smits, Ruichao Wu, Russell Toris, Ryan Borchert, ryanewel, Ryan Keating, Ryan Newell, Ryosuke Tajima, sabrina-heerklotz, Sam, Sammy Pfeiffer, Sam Pfeiffer, Samuel Bachmann, Santiago Carrion, SawYer-Robotics, scheik, Scott C. Livingston, Scott K Logan, sean-hackett, Sean Kelly, Sebastian, Sebastian Dengler, Sebastian Kasperski, Sebastian Pütz, Seyed Mahdi Shamsi, Shane Loretz, Shashank Swaminathan, Shaun Edwards, Shengye Wang, Shingo Kitagawa, Shota Aoki, simmubhangu, Simon Gabl, smoker77, smoker771, Sneha Ganesh, Stefan Fabian, Stefan May, stephankurzawe, Stephan Kurzawe, stevemacenski, Steven Macenski, Steven Peters, Steven! Ragnarök, Stian Pedersen, SuperAruba, Surya Ambrose, Takashi Ogura, tarasborov, tdk-opensource, Tejas Kumar Shastha, Teodor, TheDash, Thomas Bamford, Thomas Le Mézo, Tim, Tim Niemueller, Timo Röhling, Timotej Gašpar, Tim Robinson, tinoreycoc, Tiryoh, Tobias, Tobias Allgeyer, Tobias Roth, t-ogataseaos, Tokyo Opensource Robotics Developer 534, toliver, Tom Moore, tongsky723, Tony Baltovski, Toship, trainman419, Trevor R. Bostic, tropappar, TSC21, Tully Foote, uavc, Vedanth Narayanan, Veronica Lane, Victor Lamoine, Victor Lopez, Vikrant Shah, Vimal Kumar Verma, Vincent Rabaud, vincentrou, Vincent Rousseau, Vladimir Ermakov, Walter Nowak, Wenwei, w-haag, whoenig, William Woodall, Will Son, Wolfgang Merkt, Xavier Artache, xaxafour, xaxxon, xaxxontech, Xiaojun Huang, xiaoqiang, xuefengchang, Xuefeng Chang, Yannick Roberts, Yijiang Huang, Yoonseok Pyo, Yoshihiro Miyakoshi, YoshihiroMIYAKOSHI, Yoshito Okada, Yosuke Yamamoto, Yuan Xu, Yug Ajmera, Yuma Mihira, Zach LaCelle, Zahi Kakish, ZeKubiki, zmk5

[Manjunath_Mahashetti]

Good bye, KineticKame, you sure kicked up a revolution!

[Matosinho]

It was the first ROS distro that I’ve used… I learned ROS in 2019 at my robotics internship at SENAI. I used Kinetic with moveit and uuvsimulator to simuate a semi-autonomous UVMS operation. Here is the to the video:

Semi-autonomous UVMS simulation

and link to the paper of the project. After that I went to melodic, than noetic and I’m now struggling with foxy. I’m curious to know what happens after the “z” version of ROS2

Thank you ROS community and thank you ROS Kinetic for your contribution in robotics development. You may rest in peace now, knowing that your legacy (melodic, noetic, foxy…) is continuing your work.