Towards An Efficient Searching Approach of ROS Message by Knowledge Graph

The Robot Operating System (ROS) has become the most popular robot development framework in the last few years, which has loosely coupled structure and provides remote communications between different component nodes. The ROS messages are critical to bridge the communication channels and clearly define the data structures. The developers can use the standardized or user-customized ROS message types to construct a communication channel between two component nodes uniquely. However, it becomes increasingly difficult for developers to find the required ROS message type from thousands of diverse ROS message types in ROS-based robotic software development. Finding the proper ROS message type is a non-trivial task because developers may hardly know the exact names of required ROS messages but only has a rough knowledge of the task domain features. To tackle this challenge, we construct a novel ROS Message Knowledge Graph (RMKG) with 4543 entities and 14320 relationships, including all ROS message types and message packages. We take the shortest path algorithm to search ROS message in RMKG by searching with ROS message feature or ROS message package and visualize the subgraph structure of the search results. Moreover, we develop a ROS message package library that supports fuzzy queries to find the required message package. A comprehensive evaluation of RMKG shows the high accuracy of our knowledge construction approach. A user study indicates that RMKG is promising in helping developers find suitable ROS message types for robotics software development tasks. An effect evaluation of message package fuzzy query shows the good effects of our fuzzy query method under different situations.