Robotics Meets Software Engineering: A First Look at the Robotics Discussions on Stackoverflow

TL;DR

This study analyzes robotics-related questions on StackOverflow to identify common challenges, community engagement levels, and evolving discussion themes, providing insights into the practical difficulties faced by robotics developers.

Contribution

It offers the first detailed analysis of robotics questions on StackOverflow, revealing community size, thematic patterns, and temporal trends in robotics discussions.

Findings

Robotics questions are less visible and receive fewer responses than average questions.

Eleven major themes identified, with movement-related questions being most frequent.

Certain themes like Specifications declined over time, while others like Moving remained constant.

Abstract

Robots can greatly enhance human capabilities, yet their development presents a range of challenges. This collaborative study, conducted by a team of software engineering and robotics researchers, seeks to identify the challenges encountered by robot developers by analyzing questions posted on StackOverflow. We created a filtered dataset of 500 robotics-related questions and examined their characteristics, comparing them with randomly selected questions from the platform. Our findings indicate that the small size of the robotics community limits the visibility of these questions, resulting in fewer responses. While the number of robotics questions has been steadily increasing, they remain less popular than the average question and answer on StackOverflow. This underscores the importance of research that focuses on the challenges faced by robotics practitioners. Consequently, we conducted a thematic analysis of the 500 robotics questions to uncover common inquiry patterns. We identified 11 major themes, with questions about robot movement being the most frequent. Our analysis of yearly trends revealed that certain themes, such as Specifications, were prominent from 2009 to 2014 but have since diminished in relevance. In contrast, themes like Moving, Actuator, and Remote have consistently dominated discussions over the years. These findings suggest that challenges in robotics may vary over time. Notably, the majority of robotics questions are framed as How questions, rather than Why or What questions, revealing the lack of enough resources for the practitioners. These insights can help guide researchers and educators in developing effective and timely educational materials for robotics practitioners.