The 2017 ROS Metrics Report

tfoote · 2017-09-15T18:30:09.587Z

We’ve posted the annual ROS Metrics report for 2017. You can download it from here and it’s been added to the Metrics wiki page where you can find links to all the previous versions as well.

We started collecting metrics in 2011. Reviewing the history you can see the growth and evolution of the community.

Measuring open source communities is very hard. The nature of being open and redistributable means that we definitely do not know everyone who is using it and that’s part of being open. These metrics can provide insight into trends within the community but should not be considered exhaustive or even close to complete but as a consistent snapshot. We have public instructions for setting up mirrors and these measurements do not count the any statistics for mirrors either private or public. Public mirrors are listed at http://wiki.ros.org/Mirrors

Every year we seek to provide the same metrics so that trends can be observed. However we also look to update the metrics to include new statistics or cover new aspects that we think may be interesting trends in the future. For example we started sampling the architecture usage last year as there has been growing interest in armhf and arm64, while i386 is now dropping off in usage having previously been the most popular architecture.

In assembling this report there were several statistics that stood out to me. The biggest one is that we’ve more than doubled the number of unique visitors to packages.ros.org in the last year. This is one of the best proxies for the size of the community. Other statistics such as download counts and bandwidth usage can be highly dependent on exactly which packages get released in any given time period.

Two statistics are notable outliers. One is the number of users on discourse.ros.org there’s currently a spam attack with new unverified users being created semi-automatically. They are not getting past the verification stage and cannot post. However, the site includes them in their user count and I don’t have a good way to exclude the unverified users. They will automatically be cleared after 7 days unverified. And the other statistic that is a little bit skewed is the number of robots. This year we’ve switched from wiki.ros.org/Robots to http://robots.ros.org In the process of switching there was a bit of a review process. However, clearly with the new website submissions are down too. We’ll need to look at making that more accessible as I’m quite confident that this metric is now under-reporting.

DLu · 2017-09-17T21:43:30.794Z

Progress plotted graphically

00 - Website Metrics
01 - Website by Country
02 - ROS Answers Website Metrics
03 - Communication Platforms
04 - Wiki Stats
05 - ROS Answers Stats
06 - ROS Answers Stats
07 - ROS Answers Stats
08 - ROS Answers Stats

130s · 2017-09-19T00:24:25.707Z

Is it only me who can’t find the 2017 report PDF file?

http://download.ros.org/downloads/metrics/
Screenshot from 2017-09-18 17:22:13

Pyo · 2017-09-19T00:41:23.318Z

@130s
I can see the file without problems.

osl_pdf

http://download.ros.org/downloads/metrics/metrics-report-2017-07.pdf

rohbotics · 2017-09-19T01:34:28.607Z

That link 404s for me.

I also don’t see the 2017 report in the directory listing.

tfoote · 2017-09-19T02:04:50.047Z

Sorry the mirrors for download.ros.org appeared to be out of sync. I’ve rerun the sync and verified the file on all 3 instances now. @rohbotics and @130s can you try again?

rohbotics · 2017-09-19T02:05:44.407Z

Works now.

Thanks

Dejan_Pangercic · 2017-10-09T00:09:37.605Z

@tfoote I see that pretty much in the category of robo cars all self driving cars (Udacity, TierIV to single out just 2 of them) are missing. Is it because their maintainers did not add them to http://robots.ros.org/?

tfoote · 2017-10-09T03:52:13.613Z

Dejan_Pangercic:

@tfoote I see that pretty much in the category of robo cars all self driving cars (Udacity, TierIV to single out just 2 of them) are missing. Is it because their maintainers did not add them to http://robots.ros.org/?

Yes, we rely on the community adding their robots. If you or anyone else is familiar with a robot using ROS that’s not listed please suggest that the maintainers submit them to robots.ros.org via a pull request at GitHub - ros-infrastructure/robots.ros.org: The source for robots.ros.org . There’s a contribution guide at: Contribution Guide