Open Robotics - Anyone Interested?

The importance of robots for industry has grown immensely in the last decade. Likewise, the general public’s interest in robots have been fueled by both fact and fiction, by the flow of news about the progress in the scientific field, as well as the appearance of robots in mainstream media such as movies and television shows. There have also been attempts at creating open platforms (such as ROS, Robot Operating System) for robots as an alternative for the mostly vendor-locked robot industry. But how popular are these open alternatives? In this paper we study both the Google Trends data to identify people’s interest in robots and the IEEE Xplore’s database to find out about the popularity of robot-related themes in science. The results of the study show how much interest robots are attracting at the moment, and also the interest in open robotics, based on the data sources investigated. In addition to providing insight into the popularity of robotics today and in the past, this paper will describe the methods used for analyzing trend and publication data.