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

Abstract

Due to the high complexity, the reproducibility of experiments is one of the fundamental problems of robotics research. Although the problem has been identified by the community, the approaches to solve it are limited. The toolkit presented in this paper attempts to provide an approach to address the problem of reproducibility and the associated exchange of experimental artifacts. In order to simplify this process, the toolkit supports both the initial definition of experiments and the subsequent reproduction through a new type of workflow based on dynamic hardware-dependent assignment of services to devices and their automatic initialization. The evaluation of the system shows a high performance compared to a native solution as well as a substantial time saving compared to the manual set-up of an experiment.