Abstract

Even though research on autonomous robots and
human-robot interaction accomplished great progress in recent
years, and reusable soft- and hardware components are
available, many of the reported findings are only hardly
reproducible by fellow scientists. Usually, reproducibility is
impeded because required information, such as the specification
of software versions and their configuration, required data sets,
and experiment protocols are not mentioned or referenced
in most publications. In order to address these issues, we
recently introduced an integrated tool chain and its underlying
development process to facilitate reproducibility in robotics.
In this contribution we instantiate the complete tool chain in
a unique user study in order to assess its applicability and
usability. To this end, we chose three different robotic systems
from independent institutions and modeled them in our tool
chain, including three exemplary experiments. Subsequently,
we asked twelve researchers to reproduce one of the formerly
unknown systems and the associated experiment. We show that
all twelve scientists were able to replicate a formerly unknown
robotics experiment using our tool chain.