An Effective Method for Constructing a Robot Operating System Node Knowledge Graph Based on Open-Source Robotics Repositories

Abstract

Robot software development can be considered as a component-driven process, and existing ROS components, such as an ROS node, can be reused to construct robot applications. By reusing the ROS node, the development process of robot software can be significantly accelerated. However, the challenges in reusing ROS nodes primarily lie in the scattered organization of ROS node information. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a method to construct an ROS node knowledge graph (RNKG) based on high-quality open-source robot projects. In order to build a high-quality knowledge graph of ROS nodes, we first constructed a high-quality dataset of open-source robot projects. Since ROS node knowledge can exist in both text and code formats, we initially separated the data in the dataset into code data and text data, and then applied different knowledge extraction methods to extract corresponding entities. Finally, we integrated a series of ROS node knowledge and organized it into a knowledge graph. To validate the effectiveness of the constructed ROS node knowledge graph, we first verified the completeness of the entities and the accuracy of relationships in the knowledge graph. Next, we evaluated the performance of the ROS node knowledge graph in assisting developers with the downstream task of finding ROS nodes. These findings suggest that our proposed method for constructing an ROS node knowledge graph is feasible and demonstrate that the ROS node knowledge graph helps search ROS nodes.