CRI: CI-P: Planning a Sustainable Infrastructure for the Robot Operating System

机器人操作系统(ROS)是一大批用于机器人的开源软件，在过去的十年里，它在该领域取得了比过去更快的进步。ROS软件包括了机器人专家用来为自己编写的所有低级“管道”，以使电机转动，从他们的传感器获取数据，以及实施基本的能力，如在世界各地移动。它支持广泛的机器人硬件，并正越来越多地被全国各地的公司使用。ROS是由来自世界各地的大量志愿者编写和维护的，与任何大型开源项目一样，它面临着一些管理挑战。在这个奖项下，我们将找出这些挑战，并提出具体的解决方案，以确保ROS在未来十年仍然像过去一样有用。这个规划奖将对ROS社区进行调查，以确定生态系统和管理最佳实践中需要改进的领域，目标是撰写一份社区研究基础设施提案，以实施这些变化。我们将向社区部署在线调查，并在ROS开发人员会议和更一般的机器人会议上举办有针对性的研讨会。我们将分析这些调查和研讨会的数据，以及来自现有基础设施(维基百科、问答网站等)的更具体数据，以确定社区最紧迫的需求是什么，然后提出战略，以可持续的方式直接满足这些需求，并继续吸引社区的参与。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a large collection of open-source software for robotics that has, over the past decade, allowed more rapid progress in the field than was possible in the past. The ROS software includes all of the low-level "plumbing" that roboticists used to write for themselves to make motors turn, to get data from their sensors, and to implement basic competences like moving around the world. It supports a wide array of robot hardware, and is increasingly being used by companies across the country. ROS is written and maintained by a large collection of volunteers from around the world and, like any large open-source project, has some management challenges. Under this award, we will identify these challenges, and come up with concrete solutions for them, to ensure that ROS remains as useful over the coming decade as it was in the past.This planning award will survey the ROS community to identify the areas of the ecosystem and management best practices that need improvement, with the goal of writing a Community Research Infrastructure proposal to implement these changes. We will deploy on-line surveys to the community, and hold focused workshops at both the ROS Developers Conference and more general robotics conferences. We will analyze the data from these surveys and workshops, alongside more concrete data from the existing infrastructure (wiki, Q&A site, etc) to determine what the most pressing community needs are, and then propose strategies to directly address them in a sustainable manner that continues to engage the community.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.