Robots can greatly enhance human capabilities, yet their development presents a range of challenges. This collaborative study, conducted by a team of software engineering and robotics researchers, seeks to identify the challenges encountered by robot developers by analyzing questions posted on StackOverflow. We created a filtered dataset of 500 robotics-related questions and examined their characteristics, comparing them with randomly selected questions from the platform. Our findings indicate that the small size of the robotics community limits the visibility of these questions, resulting in fewer responses. While the number of robotics questions has been steadily increasing, they remain less popular than the average question and answer on StackOverflow. This underscores the importance of research that focuses on the challenges faced by robotics practitioners. Consequently, we conducted a thematic analysis of the 500 robotics questions to uncover common inquiry patterns. We identified 11 major themes, with questions about robot movement being the most frequent. Our analysis of yearly trends revealed that certain themes, such as Specifications, were prominent from 2009 to 2014 but have since diminished in relevance. In contrast, themes like Moving, Actuator, and Remote have consistently dominated discussions over the years. These findings suggest that challenges in robotics may vary over time. Notably, the majority of robotics questions are framed as How questions, rather than Why or What questions, revealing the lack of enough resources for the practitioners. These insights can help guide researchers and educators in developing effective and timely educational materials for robotics practitioners.

翻译：机器人能够极大地增强人类能力，但其开发过程面临一系列挑战。这项由软件工程与机器人学研究者团队合作的实证研究，旨在通过分析StackOverflow平台上的提问来识别机器人开发者遇到的实际挑战。我们构建了包含500个机器人学相关问题的筛选数据集，系统考察了其特性，并与平台随机选取的问题进行了对比分析。研究发现，机器人学社区规模较小限制了问题的可见度，导致获得的回复数量偏少。尽管机器人学问题数量持续增长，但其受欢迎程度仍低于StackOverflow平台的平均问答水平。这凸显了聚焦机器人学实践者所面临挑战的研究具有重要意义。为此，我们对500个机器人学问题进行了主题分析以揭示常见的提问模式。共识别出11个主要主题，其中关于机器人运动的问题出现频次最高。年度趋势分析表明，某些主题（如Specifications）在2009至2014年间较为突出，但近年相关性已减弱；而Moving、Actuator和Remote等主题则持续占据主导地位。这些发现表明机器人学领域的挑战可能随时间动态变化。值得注意的是，大多数机器人学问题以"如何实现"（How）而非"原理探究"（Why）或"概念界定"（What）的形式提出，反映出实践者缺乏足够的学习资源。这些见解可为研究者和教育工作者开发及时有效的机器人学教育材料提供指导。