=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3304/paper02
|storemode=property
|title=Exploring Problems and Solutions About Launch Files in ROS from Q&A Community
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3304/paper02.pdf
|volume=Vol-3304
|authors=Guangjun Jiang,Xinjun Mao
}}
==Exploring Problems and Solutions About Launch Files in ROS from Q&A Community==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3304/paper02.pdf
Exploring Problems and Solutions About Launch Files in ROS
from Q&A Community
Guangjun Jiang2, Xinjun Mao1,2*
1
College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China
2
Key Laboratory of Software Engineering for Complex Systems, National University of Defense Technology,
Changsha, China
Abstract
Robot Operating System (ROS) is a widely used software architecture for robotic systems,
which provides hardware abstractions and common functions in robotics. Launch files, as one
of the configuration files in the actual program development of ROS, provide a method to start
multiple nodes and set global parameters on the local or multiple machines at the same time.
For launch files with complex and complex content, we need to get the questions we encounter
in writing and using launch files from the Q&A community. We crawled 854 Q&A posts about
Launch files from SO and ROS Answers respectively, and conducted in-depth empirical
research. Based on the content of the Q&A posts, we roughly divided them into five topics,
including syntax specification, function implementation, running error, dependency related and
environment configuration. We used topic modelling LDA to categorize Q&A posts by topics,
and segmented them by combining the five topics already obtained. Through the results, we
found that parameter configuration and syntax errors were the main problems, and then we
made a rough analysis of the answer content of the post, and found that the quality of the ROS-
related Q&A posts was not high. The above findings inspired us to develop a template tool to
simplify the writing of Launch flies and use the node information in the Launch files to
recommend ROS nodes to lay a good foundation.
Keywords
Launch files、ROS、Empirical Study、Q&A Community、Topic Modelling
1. Introduction 1
With the rapid development of the field of robotics, robot development with ROS as the core attracts
more and more attention. ROS is an open source operating system widely used in robot development[1].
It can provide developers with many functions such as hardware abstraction, device drivers, library
functions, visualization, message passing, and package management. It provides the services expected
of an operating system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, execution of common
functions, message passing between processes, and package management. The official website of ROS
also provides various supporting documents, and related resources form a powerful ecosystem that
makes learning and using ROS very convenient[2]. Because robotic software is domain-specific and
highly platform-dependent, robotic software development faces a series of challenges[3]: robotic
software development requires developers to have both robotics domain knowledge and software
development capabilities, and to be able to transform existing programs for different platforms.
ROS projects usually include many files, such as source code, configuration files, message files, etc.
Launch files, as a configuration file, are used to facilitate launching multiple nodes at the same time[4].
Launch files are a startup configuration file in xml syntax with the extension .launch. If you want to
start multiple nodes for a robot, this means opening corresponding multiple terminals. Starting each
node one by one with the rosrun command in the terminal is cumbersome and error-prone. The above
ICBASE2022@3rd International Conference on Big Data & Artificial Intelligence & Software Engineering, October 21-
23, 2022, Guangzhou, China
EMAIL: jgj16@nudt.edu.cn (Guangjun Jiang); xjmao@nudt.edu.cn (Xinjun Mao)
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
9
problems can be effectively solved by Launch files. We write all nodes in a Launch file based on XML
format, use the roslaunch command to parse this file, and then easily start all nodes. The roslaunch
command will automatically start ROS nodes Manage nodes and parameter servers, so we don't need
to start roscore separately[5]. If Launch files are used, then all operations will be completed in one
command, improving the development efficiency of ROS developers. It includes many types of tags,
and different tags correspond to different functions. Table 1 clearly shows the relationship between
them.
TABLE 1: Labels and functions of Launch files.
Label Function
root tag
start node
nested
rename
global parameters
load parameters
node grouping
local parameters
remote tag
environment variable
test node
General steps to write a Launch file: (1) Set default values for command line parameters. (2) Through
the label, set the inclusion relationship of the Launch file. (3) Set node information, including name,
namespace, parameter. (4) Set the remap as needed, then set the remap relationship.
In the actual ROS development process, various problems will be encountered when writing and
using Launch files, which requires the study of common problems and solutions[6]. As different
versions of ROS robots are iterated, upgraded, bringing new concepts, techniques and tools from
software engineering and distributed systems, this is reflected in the rapid increase in discussions on
this topic on Q&A sites such as Stack Overflow, and at the same time, we combined with ROS Answers,
it is also a Q&A website. Its format is the same as Stack Overflow, and its content is related to ROS
development. With the development of ROS, its community activity is also developing rapidly. We can
see this trend from Figure 1. As a relatively small field, the use and writing of Launch files is very
critical to improving the efficiency of ROS development. There are relatively few studies on Launch
files. Estefo et al. [7] analyzed the code repetition in Launch files and found that 25% of them have
more. The packages of two startup files have duplicated code, and the clones are very similar,
quantifying the code quality of the ROS ecosystem for the first time.
We use LDA for topic modeling, statistical analysis of topic representations, and an in-depth
exploration of our findings. We aim to analyze issues encountered by Launch file developers and
corresponding solutions from SO and ROS Answers. Also, analyze and summarize solutions to different
problems.
Figure 1: The number of users in the ROS community over time.
10
Therefore, this paper presents an analysis that aims at answering three research questions: RQ1:
What are the problems related to Launch files in the SO and ROS Answers communities? RQ2: What
are the corresponding solutions for different types of problems? RQ3: How to combine Launch files to
improve the development efficiency of ROS developers? The contributions of this paper are twofold:
(1) problems discovery and classification of Launch files in the Q&A community; (2) solutions for
different problems.
2. Background and Definitions
Although Launch files are only a small part of the ROS files, but in the analysis of the ROS-related
Q&A posts in SO, there are as many as 2954 Q&A posts related to ROS, of which there are 562 Q&A
posts about the Launch files, accounting for 19.03 %[8], we can see the importance of Launch files for
ROS development. The Q&A posts about Launch files in SO are usually about configuration
environment, running errors, etc. But in our actual development process, about the writing
specifications and syntax of Launch files, there are requirements for implementing a certain function
with Launch files. Also many, in ROS Answers we can find posts on related topics.
In SO and ROS Answers, a post can have many tags to define, only if it is related to Launch files,
we can consider as Launch files-related, but many Launch files-tagged posts and their content has
nothing to do with Launch files[9]. It requires we manually remove such posts. At the same time, based
on the development experience of ROS, we have summarized five topics of problems about Launch
files.
Phase 1:Identification of Relevant Questions
‘launch file’
Manual analysis
tag
SOTorrent& 1089 854
ROS Answers launch files relevant
questions launch files
questions
Phase 2:Classification of Questions
83(9.72%)
252(29.51%)
related
Running error
dependencies
questions
questions
158(18.50%) 162(18.97%)
199(23.30%)
environment feature ROS
syntax specification
configuration implementation
questions questions
questions development
experience
Pro-processing Topic modeling
topics five topics
...
interpretation subjects
Phase 3:Topic Modeling
Figure 2: Framework for extracting Launch files questions from the Q&A community. Phase 1 crawls
the questions, phase 2 manually divides the questions into five categories, phase 3 employs topic
modelling to group the questions into subjects.
11
3. Empirical Study Design
Our goal is to study questions related to Launch files on the Q&A community. From the obtained
results, we can analyze the solutions for different problems in the answer.Therefore, we ask three
research questions:
RQ1: What are the problems related to Launch files in the SO and ROS Answers communities?
RQ2: What are the corresponding solutions for different types of problems?
RQ3: How to combine Launch files to improve the development efficiency of ROS developers?
3.1. Data Collection
We downloaded all publicly accessible data (as of July 2022) in SOTorrent[10], and selected all SO
questions and their answers, and utilized the scrapy framework to scrape relevant Q&A posts from the
ROS Answer web page.
The framework we used to identify discussions related to Launch files from Q&A posts is shown in
Figure 2. The framework consists of two phases. In the first stage, we retrieved 1089 related questions
from the Q&A posts with launch file as the tag. At the same time, we also retrieved with tagged ‘xml’
and ‘launch’. Because many Launch files-tagged posts are not related to the Launch files, we manually
screened them one by one, and finally got 854 Launch files-related posts.
3.2. Classification of Launch files-related Questions
The second part of our experiment is mainly to initially classify 854 posts, which requires certain
ROS development experience to guide, we need to have a deep and clear understanding of the writing
and use of Launch files. We finally determined five categories of problems in Launch files, including
syntax specification, function implementation, operation Errors, dependencies, environment
configuration, which have a good reference for the later classification with LDA. The five categories
nicely contain all the posts.
3.3. Topic modeling.
Data pre-processing. Firstly, We remove HTML tags, code snippets, URLs and stop words[11].
Secondly, to minimize noise, we use the initial set of NLTK stop words [12]to build a list of stop words
specific to this study, we also lemmatize the document collection of SpaCy [13]. Finally, we remove
the words that appear in more than 80% and less than 2% of the documents to get the corpus.
Topic modeling. Latent Dirichlet assignment (LDA) [14] is a traditional topic modeling model. The
LDA model is a very basic and well-known model in NLP. The essence of the LDA model is a
generative Bayesian probability model containing a three-layer structure of words, topics and corpora.
We used LDA and the mallet tool [15]. The LDA settings are configured according to the guideline
[16], followed by empirical experiments on our dataset. By constantly modifying the values of 𝐾 and
𝐼 and randomly selecting 50 posts for testing, in the end, we used 𝐾=18 topics, because each topic is
described by 10 words, but these words cannot represent each topic clearly, Therefore, we combined
the ROS development experience to analyze the descriptions of these words and get the corresponding
topics. We got 18 subjects, combined with the previous 5 categories, we included these 18 subjects, and
we can clearly see the proportion of different subjects. From it, we can see the proportion of different
question posts in the total, and we can also see the proportion of subjects under the same category.
4. Empirical Study Results
RQ1: What are the problems related to Launch files in the SO and ROS Answers communities?
According to the 18 subjects obtained by the IDA model, we include them in five categories.
According to the results of figure 3, we can clearly see that the parameter configuration in the syntax
12
specification and the wrong file syntax in the runtime error account for the largest proportion. This
shows that when we write and use Launch files, there are many problems in the use of parameter
configuration and internal syntax. In fact, this is also the key to the use of Launch files. Because the
Launch files themselves are a kind of configuration files, there are many labels and parameters that
need to be configured in the file. The node label is more important in the Launch files, and the parameter
information in it is related to whether the node is running normally.
In other categories, we see that many questioners ask questions without thinking carefully after
encountering problems. For example, the running command is wrong, which is a relatively simple error.
RQ2: What are the corresponding solutions for different types of problems?
The main problems with Launch files are syntax problems and parameter configuration problems.
In the corresponding answers, I removed the unanswered questions. In the answered posts, I removed
the posts with only one answer and not accepted by the questioner, which to some extent guarantees the
quality of the answer. For the answers to syntax questions and parameter configuration, most of them
give similar correct examples for the questioner's reference, and few really give correct and operational
answers.
For the problem of function implementation, usually give the answers are relatively clear, but the
answers given by the respondents are not very clear to the functionally complex questions raised by
some people. In the question of syntax specification, many answers give more practice and give the
writing specification of launch files. In SO, because there are many questions about environment
configuration, and there are few satisfactory answers. For a novice ROS developer, I recommend going
to ROS Answers to search and learn more.
Figure 3: Categorization of Launch files-related problems.
RQ3: How to combine Launch files to improve the development efficiency of ROS developers?
In response to the troublesome configuration of Launch files parameters, we can recommend
template-based parameters based on some context-related parameter variables.
According to the nodes in Launch files are related, because they may be in a launch file to complete
a certain task together, and the node name recommendation in the process of writing Launch files can
be realized by combining the source code and probabilistic dependencies. Overall, community users are
not very active in the answers to ROS-related Q&A posts, and may be closely related to the fact that
there are not many people engaged in ROS development.
13
5. Conclusion
This article analyzes issues related to launch files on the Q&A community. We divided the 854
Launch files into five categories, including syntax specification, function implementation, operation
Errors, dependencies, environment configuration and classified them using a topic modeling approach,
resulting in 18 subjects. The results show that the wrong syntax in the runtime error of the Launch files
and the parameter configuration in the syntax specification are the two main problems. At the same
time, we did a rough analysis of the responses to some of the posts.
As future work, we will conduct empirical studies on other ROS profiles to study the impact of the
current ROS ecosystem on ROS development, and intend to share and discuss our findings with the
ROS developer community to validate and enrich our research. In the future, we will continue our work
and further explore and research the problems existing in ROS in conjunction with the Q&A community.
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