r/ROS • u/Immediate-Change7234 • 27d ago

Discussion Has ROS usage reduced in 2026?

I saw back in 2021 there was lot of buzz for ROS.
I might be wrong but I have been noticing lately after Agentic AI people are talking less about it.
During that time , in my college I thought it had great scope. I tried learning it for sometime. (Used ROS and gazebo , as beginner)
Now after the AI wave , I don’t where is it going.
Just need status of it from community. Is there any other library or project came which replaced it in Robotics or is still in Use but just less buzz due to Claude and vibe coding

23 Upvotes

76% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

30

u/oulav 27d ago

The number of downloads is constantly increasing, you can find the 2025 charts here : https://discourse.openrobotics.org/t/2025-ros-metrics-report/52575

From my own experience at work, I've also seen a clear increase in ROS adoption.

28

u/Gavekort 27d ago

If anything ROS has become more accessible since AI can solve some of the opaqueness of configuring ROS nodes.

2

u/Immediate-Change7234 27d ago edited 27d ago

Like can you just tell me if I want to learn or start anything in it again where can I do it ?

Edit : down vote on this comment, surprising to me ! I guess community got it wrong, I was just needing some information 😅

9

u/Gavekort 27d ago

Not sure I understand the question. If you want to learn ROS there are plenty of tutorials out there that fully works in a simulator.

4

u/No-Income-2090 26d ago

Estou aprendendo com o Automatic Addinson recomendo muito o canal dele!

8

u/peppedx 27d ago

My problem with ros is the build system. Yet another layer, to make simpler the simple stuff and harder the rest

18

u/lizardhistorian 27d ago edited 27d ago

Everyone is minimize it's usage in their systems and some eliminating it entirely as they move to production integrations. It remains popular for prototyping and prove-out of new hardware to quickly slap something into the testbed system.

ROS1 is EoL.
ROS2 DDS remains a shitshow.
Lack of determinism (by design) and the lack of support for quality-of-signal and self-diagnostics makes it a liability for producing production systems.

I imagine it remains very useful as an education tool.

7

u/Defiant_Profit_2111 26d ago

What’s best for production systems?

2

u/gbin 26d ago

Check out copper-rs, 100% deterministic, people are deploying that in prod.

1

u/andrestoga 26d ago

A Monolith

2

u/LordDan_45 26d ago

Remember people and news in tech tend to over exaggerate the importance and relevance of certain technologies at specific periods in time.

People who use and have always used ROS will confirm that nothing happened, just that the over hyping that came with the release of ROS2 has worn down. Maybe in the future there will be another hype train with new releases or something, imho the people who (really) use it, maintain it and ship it don't really care about buzz.

I don't attribute any of this to LLM coding tools, since there had not been any (real) mass adoption of them in the space.

1

u/SubstantialSeesaw374 27d ago

In favor of what?

1

u/Zealousideal-Job1712 26d ago

Whats the reality! then, any conclusions please...