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

机器人操作系统（ROS）是一个大型的机器人开源软件集合，在过去的十年中，它使该领域的进步比过去更快。 ROS软件包括机器人专家过去为自己编写的所有低级“管道”，以使马达转动，从传感器获取数据，并实现基本的能力，如在世界各地移动。 它支持各种机器人硬件，并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，就像任何大型开源项目一样，它也有一些管理上的挑战。 在该奖项下，我们将识别这些挑战，并为其提出具体的解决方案，以确保ROS在未来十年内仍然像过去一样有用。该规划奖将调查ROS社区，以确定生态系统的领域和管理需要改进的最佳实践，目标是编写社区研究基础设施提案来实施这些变化。 我们将向社区部署在线调查，并在ROS开发者大会和更一般的机器人会议上举办重点研讨会。 我们将分析来自这些调查和研讨会的数据，以及来自现有基础设施（wiki，问答网站等）的更具体的数据，以确定最迫切的社区需求是什么，然后提出策略，以可持续的方式直接解决这些问题，继续参与社区。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.