Today by far the most commonly used robotics software is ROS, which stands for Robot Operating System. This is an open source software, and the most number of developers and robotics users are involved with this program with an ever increasing rate. It contains set of libraries, algorithms, developer tools and drivers for developing robotics projects. The first release of ROS was in 2010, and as of end of 2016, ROS has reached its 10th official release, which is called “ROS Kinetic Kame”. There are translations to 11 languages other than English, which are: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Turkish, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Thai and Chinese. It currently has 2000+ software libraries, which keeps increasing every year.

Many robots use ROS now, including but not limited to hobby robots, drones, educational or advanced humanoid robots, domestic robots including cleaning robot vacuums, cooking robots or telepresence robots and more, robot arms, farming robots, industrial robots, even Robonaut of NASA in space or the four legged military robots in development. A list of robots which use ROS can be found here: http://wiki.ros.org/Robots.

We were checking the Alexa.Com ranking of ROS since few years, in order to track the increase in usage, and we believe it is time to share it now, as we have enough data. The numbers on the left are dates we looked and the numbers on the right indicate the ranking of Ros.Org website from top, among all websites in the world:

May 2011: 189,000 th in the world, from top, among all other websites

April 2012: 187,900 th

January 2014: 107,821

May 2014: 112,236

September 2014: 83,875  (7219 in Canada, the country where it is most accessed)

January 2015: 83,556 (4,258 in Canada)

February 2015 : 75,680 (33185 in USA)

April 2015: 59,200 (31,334 in USA)

August 2015: 65,754 (50,132 in USA)

September 2016: 30,201 (China 5073)

As can be seen here, in May 2011, when we first checked this ranking, ROS.org was at 189,000 th place in the world from the top among all other websites in terms of unique visitors that visit the site, and it almost continuously increased its ranking. As of September 2016, it is now the 30,201st most reached website in the world, with mostly being accessed in China (5073 from top in China). Let’s not forget that even if it’s position remained the same, let alone going up, it would still mean the traffic of the site was going up, as every year there are more websites in the world which means the same ranking means better place and more traffic. The ranking of 30,201 means ROS.org is a very high traffic website in the world right now, being accessed probably by at least hundreds of thousands of people every day, with no indication of slowing down its rise yet.

The most important result of all of this, is that the use of robots is increasing, both in terms of number and type (when you look at the type of robots that use ros, as it also increases in variety all the time).

From Alexa, we were also able to see, from publicly available information, that the percentage of reach among countries for ROS.org is as follows:

China 47.5%

USA 11.5%

Japan 8.7%

South Korea 3.5%

Germany 3.4%

This also shows us that in China, a lot of things are going on for robotics development right now, as it gets most of its traffic from there with 47.5%. USA then follows with 11.5% and Japan is third with 8.7%.

With ROS, any type of sensors can be controlled, including 1d/2d range sensors, 3d range finders and cameras, audio/speech recognition sensors, cameras, environmental sensors, force/torque/touch sensors, motion capture, pose estimation, power supply, RFID, and sensor interfaces.

In ros.org site, in addition to all packages, there are also extensive tutorials and a discussion board that one can ask questions and share knowledge.

ROS also has an industrial section, the version of software modified for industrial applications. It is called ROS industrial, and can be reached at: http://rosindustrial.org/. Although we see domestic robots with new abilities or advanced research projects that aim to develop capabilities of robotics every year, according to the results of a study that is shown on http://rosindustrial.org/the-challenge/ website, the abilities of industrial robots are not progressing and the abilities are restricted to welding, material handling, dispensing, coating (although we know that they do additional tasks such as packaging, inspection, labeling etc…). ROS Industrial aims to solve this challenge by providing a common skeleton to all developers, with its extensive and stronger software architecture, than other individual robotics programs.

  robot operating system, ros