The state of ROS research
Seventeen years of Robot Operating System literature — how the ecosystem evolved, where the research concentrates, and what runs on which robots.
Ecosystem timelines
From the “Next-Generation ROS” announcement to Zenoh breaking the DDS monopoly — three timelines of the platform this literature is built on.
Where research concentrates
Cross-sections of the dataset: which research topics run on which robot platforms, and which topics co-occur in the same papers.
Robot platform × research subdomain
Papers at each intersection of deployment platform and research subdomain.
Topic label co-occurrence
How often the 20 most frequent topic labels appear together in the same paper.
Growth & adoption
Publication growth
Papers per year by ROS version — the ROS 2 wave begins around 2020.
ROS 2 adoption rate
ROS 2 + “Both” papers as a share of each year’s output.
Manuscript types
How the literature is published.
The research landscape
Research taxonomy
ROS version → research domain → subdomain. Click a ring segment to zoom in.
ROS 2 research domains
Where ROS 2 research effort concentrates.
ROS 2 contribution types
Applications vs. core ROS work vs. ecosystem tooling.
Research subdomains
Subdomains of ROS 2 research, ranked.
Top publishers
Publishers of ROS 2 literature, top ten.
Application fields
Industry verticals where ROS gets deployed.
Robot platforms
The hardware ROS research runs on.
Trending topic labels
The 20 most frequent topic labels across all papers.