Getting Started with ROS2 Development: A Case Study of Software Development Challenges

ROS2 has started to gain attention from the industry as it fosters robot software development. Companies seek to use ROS2 in real products, thus increasing the need for ROS2-related skills. We investigate what kind of challenges junior software developers – i.e. computer science majors on one of their last B.Sc study modules – encounter when learning robotics using ROS2. We conduct a case study with a group of five students with a project goal to develop a robotic application utilizing an agile software development process. We inquire about the challenges after the project using semi-structured interviews. By analyzing the interviews we identified 87 development challenge instances that can be roughly divided into challenges caused by insufficient or misinterpreted documentation and challenges encountered during the development process or usage of ROS2 and its packages. Hence, based on the results, we suggest that the ROS2 community should invest in an integrated resource to help with ROS2 development and patch up the currently fragmented documentation of individual packages in order for it to be adopted more easily as a technology by junior software developers.