[ros-users] [Discourse.ros.org] [Next Generation ROS] ROS 2 Customer Stories Report

[Dave Coleman via Discourse.ros.org]

Hi ROS2 Community,

I'd like to share a ROS 2 community report that, through various user interviews, discusses the current needs of ROS 2 for mass adoption by the community:

https://picknik.ai/docs/ROS2_User_Stories_Report.pdf

## Executive Summary

This report summarizes 15 interviews with users, or potential users, of the Robotic Operating 
System (ROS) conducted by PickNik Consulting for Amazon Web Services and the ROS 2 
Technical Steering Committee (TSC). It is motivated by Amazon's customer-focused approach 
to developing their product specifications, and is intended to inform future ROS 2 resource 
allocations after the December 2018 ROS Crystal, the third release of ROS 2.  
 
The feedback collected and types of feature requests varied greatly. Even considering the 
diverse applications of ROS, it is remarkable how many use cases and needs exist in the 
robotics community. This plethora of sometimes conflicting requests inspires great respect for 
the challenges faced by Open Robotics and the ROS 2 development team in making design 
decisions and choosing the current feature set. While reviewing this report we ask the reader 
keep in mind that criticizing ROS is much easier than actually creating an open source, 
robot-agnostic, multi-purpose robotics middleware. 
 
The primary takeaway from this report is that most of the key features needed by potential ROS 
2 users have been addressed, but robustness and reliability through hardware testing is a huge 
unaddressed concern of users. Similarly, a branding and marketing problem remains due to 
overdue promises and scattered online assets. The strategy we believe would best address 
both of these concerns would be to choose a flagship hardware platform and set inspiring 
milestones (stretch goals) that would demonstrate ROS 2's applied capabilities (such as 
navigation and manipulation) while generating impressive demo videos. This effort would also 
spotlight missing feature areas still required for using ROS 2 on actual hardware.





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