Geographically Distributed Deployment of Reproducible HRI Experiments in an Interdisciplinary Research Context

Abstract

Reproducible experiments are a major requirement for transparent, comparable and verifiable results in the field of human-robot interaction (HRI). Furthermore, a version-controlled and well-structured "ready to deploy" system setup of soft- and hard-ware for an HRI experiment opens up a range of innovative possibilities for interdisciplinary efforts as well as simplified participation of collaborators in the research community. However, making experiments reproducible is not a trivial task. It stems from the lack of agreed upon methodologies, tools and the inherent technical complexity. In this work we present our latest efforts in the context of an international and interdisciplinary research project to enable robotics researchers, software engineers, and social scientists to work together to reproduce a behavioral HRI experiment. The successful reproduction demonstrates that our tool chain approach meets the proposed requirements of the reproducibility problem. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time an integrated systemic approach allowed an identical instantiation of a complete HRI experiment at geographically distributed locations.