Robotics Meets Software Engineering: A First Look at the Robotics Discussions on Stackoverflow
Hisham Kidwai, Danika Passler Bates, Sujana Islam Suhi, Md Nahidul Islam Opu, James Young, Shaiful Chowdhury

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…
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Taxonomy
TopicsScientific Computing and Data Management
