ROS package search for robot software development: a knowledge graph-based approach.

In recent years, ROS (Robot Operating System) packages have become increasingly popular as a type of software artifact that can be effectively reused in robotic software development. Indeed, finding suitable ROS packages that closely match the software's functional requirements from the vast number of available packages is a nontrivial task using current search methods. The traditional search methods for ROS packages often involve inputting keywords related to robotic tasks into general-purpose search engines (e.g., Google) or code hosting platforms (e.g., GitHub) to obtain approximate results of all potentially suitable ROS packages. However, the accuracy of these search methods remains relatively low because the task-related keywords may not precisely match the functionalities offered by the ROS packages. To improve the search accuracy of ROS packages, this paper presents a novel semantic-based search approach that relies on the semantic-level ROS Package Knowledge Graph (RPKG) to automatically retrieve the most suitable ROS packages. Firstly, to construct the RPKG, we employ multi-dimensional feature extraction techniques to extract semantic concepts, including code file name, category, hardware device, characteristics, and function, from the dataset of ROS package text descriptions. The semantic features extracted from this process result in a substantial number of entities (32,294) and relationships (54,698). Subsequently, we create a robot domain-specific small corpus and further fine-tune a pre-trained language model, BERT-ROS, to generate embeddings that effectively represent the semantics of the extracted features. These embeddings play a crucial role in facilitating semantic-level understanding and comparisons during the ROS package search process within the RPKG. Secondly, we introduce a novel semantic matching-based search algorithm that incorporates the weighted similarities of multiple features from user search queries, which searches out more accurate ROS packages than the traditional keyword search method. To validate the enhanced accuracy of ROS package searching, we conduct comparative case studies between our semantic-based search approach and four baseline search approaches: ROS Index, GitHub, Google, and ChatGPT. The experiment results demonstrate that our approach achieves higher accuracy in terms of ROS package searching, outperforming the other approaches by at least 21% from 5 levels, including top1, top5, top10, top15, and top20. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]