I find this statement pretty interesting @fmrico and while I don’t fully disagree when it comes to “a final product” , I actually have a pretty strong opinion about the usefulness of ROS (ROS 2 in particular) to compare different individual components. Our team, often, finds that comparing two different pieces of hardware of the same kind (e.g. two cameras or two actuators aimed for a similar task) is actually pretty hard. Specially because things like communication interfaces and APIs differ substantially (which makes system integration a complete hell most of the time).
Our approach for the last years has been to “find common ground” to attack these comparisons. Typically, assuming you have component A (C_A) and component B (C_B) with their respective interfaces, let’s say I_A and I_B, to compare them. Often, you’d go ahead and create an abstraction layer on top of I_A and I_B called AL that allows you to speak to both components and effectively make the comparisons. This way, you can inspect which component C_A or C_B actually performs better for your needs.
To us, AL=ROS. I think this is one of the core principles of ROS and also, the reason why we selected it when we started building H-ROS years ago covering not only logical and electrical interfaces but a wide variety of aspects required to go from a component to a module (note that modules imply certain characteristics including interoperability).
Now, back to your statement, I believe it depends very much on the “final product” (assuming we’re speaking of robots, final robots) itself. E.g., we started a while defining models for a composite set of robot modules. While this is still a work in progress, we managed to interface with several 6DoF arms (model proposed) and that provided quite a bit of insight that we later used in the development of our latest robots so I’d argue that you can actually compare certain final products with ROS.
@fmrico I’m very interested to hear what’s your reaction to this since as I said, we’re still exploring this path and we certainly could use additional insight.