Investigating ROS2 readiness for industrial use

Our research also investigated developer experience by focusing on novice users of ROS2. We arranged a project course that simulated real-world software development processes where students had to develop a robotic application. After the project, we carefully interviewed the participants and applied qualitative data analysis methods to understand the pain points of learning and using ROS2 in real-world projects. Such information enabled us to identify what potential development bottlenecks can be expected when ROS2 is adopted by a new user. Figure 1: Comparison of time interval between sent messages that mimic realt ROS2 message when applying increasing CPU load Besides that, we took the chance and seized the opportunity to work together with Atostek Oy. Our cooperation produced fruitful results, which yielded a twofold contribution. Initially, we produced a list of existing ROS2-based software development challenges to understand what kind of challenges its users can encounter. After acknowledging the challenges, we applied Atostek Oy’s Flexbot framework, which aims to reduce the development complexity and mitigate some of the challenges with novel development practices. With this work, we demonstrated what issues hinder ROS2 development and how novel practices, in this case, shown by Flexbot, can mitigate some of them and make the process easier and more convenient.