# Usability Squared: Principles for doing good systems research in robotics

## TL;DR

This paper argues that improving usability in robotics systems research is crucial for enabling broader real-world deployment and proposes principles to make robotics research more accessible and applicable for developers.

## Contribution

It introduces principles for usability-centered robotics systems research, emphasizing abstraction usability and research applicability for application developers.

## Key findings

- Highlighting the scarcity of large-scale deployments outside heavy industry
- Proposing usability principles for robotics systems research
- Suggesting community-level changes to foster better systems research environment

## Abstract

Despite recent major advances in robotics research, massive injections of capital into robotics startups, and significant market appetite for robotic solutions, large-scale real-world deployments of robotic systems remain relatively scarce outside of heavy industry and (recently) warehouse logistics. In this paper, we posit that this scarcity comes from the difficulty of building even merely functional, first-pass robotic applications without a dizzying breadth and depth of expertise, in contrast to the relative ease with which non-experts in cloud computing can build complex distributed applications that function reasonably well. We trace this difficulty in application building to the paucity of good systems research in robotics, and lay out a path toward enabling application building by centering usability in systems research in two different ways: privileging the usability of the abstractions defined in systems research, and ensuring that the research itself is usable by application developers in the context of evaluating it for its applicability to their target domain by following principles of realism, empiricism, and exhaustive explication. In addition, we make some suggestions for community-level changes, incentives, and initiatives to create a better environment for systems work in robotics.