SwarmRob: A Toolkit for Reproducibility and Sharing of Experimental Artifacts in Robotics Research
This addresses the fundamental issue of reproducibility in robotics research, which is a domain-specific problem for researchers, and is incremental as it builds on existing virtualization concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of reproducibility and sharing of experimental artifacts in robotics research by proposing a toolkit based on operating-system-level virtualization, which isolates artifacts in containers for distribution and enables a novel workflow to describe, execute, and distribute software-artifacts to heterogeneous robots dynamically, supporting researchers in executing and reproducing experimental evaluations.
Due to the complexity of robotics, the reproducibility of results and experiments is one of the fundamental problems in robotics research. While the problem has been identified by the community, the approaches that address the problem appropriately are limited. The toolkit proposed in this paper tries to deal with the problem of reproducibility and sharing of experimental artifacts in robotics research by a holistic approach based on operating-system-level virtualization. The experimental artifacts of an experiment are isolated in "containers" that can be distributed to other researchers. Based on this, this paper presents a novel experimental workflow to describe, execute and distribute experimental software-artifacts to heterogeneous robots dynamically. As a result, the proposed solution supports researchers in executing and reproducing experimental evaluations.