SwarmRob: A Toolkit for Reproducibility and Sharing of Experimental Artifacts in Robotics Research

TL;DR

SwarmRob introduces a comprehensive toolkit leveraging OS-level virtualization to enhance reproducibility and sharing of experimental artifacts in robotics research, facilitating dynamic distribution and execution across diverse robotic platforms.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel experimental workflow and a toolkit that enable reproducibility and sharing of robotics experiments through containerization and dynamic distribution.

Findings

Supports reproducibility of robotics experiments

Enables sharing of experimental artifacts across heterogeneous robots

Facilitates dynamic execution and evaluation

Abstract

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.