Code duplication in ROS launchfiles

Abstract

The middleware for robotics ROS has become the de-facto standard for developing robot applications. Thanks to our experience using ROS we conjectured that the quality of code of ROS is low, yielding a poor user experience for ROS users and posing important barriers to robot software development. In this work we present a first quantification of code quality of the ROS ecosystem through an analysis of code duplication in launchfiles. Our experience led us to believe that these configuration files exhibit a significant amount of code duplication, and this study shows that it is indeed the case. We find that 25% of packages with multiple launchfiles have duplicated code, and that clones are highly similar.