Abstract
The debate on the experimental method, its role, its limits, and its possible applications has recently gained attention in autonomous robotics. If, from the one hand, classical experimental principles, such as repeatability and reproducibility, play as an inspiration for the development of good experimental practices in this research area, from the other hand, some recent analyses have evidenced that rigorous experimental approaches are not yet full part of the research habits in this community. In this paper, in order to give reason of a part of the current experimental practice in autonomous robotics that cannot be satisfactorily accommodated under the traditional concept of controlled experiment, we will advance the notion of explorative experiment. Explorative experiments in this context should be intended as a form of investigation carried out in the absence of a proper theory or theoretical background, where the control of the experimental factors cannot be fully managed from the beginning. We show that this notion arises from (and is supported by) the analysis of the experimental activities reported in a significant sample of papers that have been given awards at two of the largest and most impacting robotics research conferences.
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Notes
- 1.
Generally speaking, and for the purpose of our presentation, a robot system is an artifact that interacts with the external environment through its sensors and actuators and that is controlled by software programs.
- 2.
In this work we use the terms “computing”, “computer science”, and “computer science and engineering” in an interchangeable way to name the academic discipline. While recognizing the relevant difference between the theoretical and practical ends of the computing spectrum, introducing a taxonomy is beyond our scope here.
- 3.
Although it is out of the scope of the present paper to investigate the exact positioning of explorative experiments, we believe they represent an orthogonal dimension with respect to the five categories of experiments introduced by (Tedre 2015) and discussed before.
- 4.
Note that, in most of the papers we analyzed in our survey, this iteration process is only hinted and only final successful tests are described in detail.
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Amigoni, F., Schiaffonati, V. (2016). Explorative Experiments in Autonomous Robotics. In: Magnani, L., Casadio, C. (eds) Model-Based Reasoning in Science and Technology. Studies in Applied Philosophy, Epistemology and Rational Ethics, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38983-7_33
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