The cognitive interaction toolkit – Improving reproducibility of Robotic systems experiments

Research on robot systems either integrating a large number of capabilities in a single architecture or displaying outstanding performance in a single domain achieved considerable progress over the last years. Results are typically validated through experimental evaluation or demonstrated live, e.g., at robotics competitions. While common robot hardware, simulation and programming platforms yield an improved basis, many of the described experiments still cannot be reproduced easily by interested researchers to confirm the reported findings. We consider this a critical challenge for experimental robotics. Hence, we address this problem with a novel process which facilitates the reproduction of robotics experiments. We identify major obstacles to experiment replication and introduce an integrated approach that allows (i) aggregation and discovery of required research artifacts, (ii) automated software build and deployment, as well as (iii) experiment description, repeatable execution and evaluation. We explain the usage of the introduced process along an exemplary robotics experiment and discuss our approach in the context of current ecosystems for robot programming and simulation. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.