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.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
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.
References
Amigoni, F., & Schiaffonati, V. (2010). Good experimental methodologies and simulation in autonomous mobile robotics. In L. Magnani, W. Carnielli & C. Pizzi (Eds.), Model-based reasoning in science and technology (pp. 315–322). Berlin: Springer.
Amigoni, F., & Schiaffonati, V. (2014). Autonomous mobile robot as technical artifacts: A discussion of experimental issues. In L. Magnani (Ed.), Model-based reasoning in science and technology (pp. 527–542). Berlin: Springer.
Amigoni, F., Schiaffonati, V., & Verdicchio, M. (2014). Good experimental methodologies for autonomous robotics: From theory to practice. In F. Amigoni & V. Schiaffonati (Eds.), Methods and experimental techniques in computer engineering (pp. 37–53). Berlin: SpringerBriefs in Applied Sciences and Technology, Springer.
Bergstrom, N., Bjorkman, M., & Kragic, D. (2011). Generating object hypotheses in natural scenes through human-robot interaction. In Proceedings of IROS (pp. 827–833).
Bonsignorio, F., & del Pobil, A. (2015). Special issue on replicable and measurable robotics research. IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, 22(3), 32–154.
Bonsignorio, F., Hallam, J., & del Pobil, A. (2015). Special interest group on good experimental methodologies. http://www.heronrobots.com/EuronGEMSig/gem-sig-events. Last visited November 2015.
Boularias, A., Duvallet, F., Oh, J., & Stentz, A. (2015). Grounding spatial relations for outdoor robot navigation. In Proceedings of ICRA, 2015 (pp. 1976–1982).
Burian, R. M. (1997). Exploratory experimentation and the role of histochemical techniques in the work of Jean Brachet, 1938–1952. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 19, 27–45.
Chu, V., McMahon, I., Riano, L., McDonald, C., He, Q., Martinez Perez-Tejada, J., et al. (2013). Using robotic exploratory procedures to learn the meaning of haptic adjectives. In Proceedings of ICRA, 2013 (pp. 3048–3055).
Daniel, C., Neumann, G., & Peters, J. (2012). Learning concurrent motor skills in versatile solution spaces. In Proceedings of IROS, 2012 (pp. 3591–3597).
Deisenroth, M., Englert, P., Peters, J., & Fox, D. (2014). Multi-task policy search for robotics. In Proceedings of ICRA (pp. 3876–3881).
Fasola, J., & Mataric, M. (2013). Using semantic fields to model dynamic spatial relations in a robot architecture for natural language instruction of service robots. In Proceedings of IROS, 2013 (pp. 143–150).
Franklin, L. (2005). Exploratory experiments. Philosophy of Science, 72, 888–899.
Gemici, M., & Saxena, A. (2014). Learning haptic representation for manipulating deformable food objects. In Proceedings of IROS, 2014 (pp. 638–645).
Grollman, D., & Billard, A. (2011). Donut as I do: Learning from failed demonstrations. In Proceedings of ICRA, 2011 (pp. 3804–3809).
Hacking, I. (1983). Representing and intervening. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hansson, S. O. (2015). Experiments before science?—What science learned from technological experiments. In S. O. Hansson (Ed.), The role of technology in science: Philosophical perspectives (pp. 81–110). Dordrecht: Springer.
Hoffman, G., & Weinberg, G. (2010). Gesture-based human-robot jazz improvisation. In Proceedings of ICRA, 2010 (pp. 582–587).
Kroes, P. (2015). Experiments on socio-technical systems: The problem of control. In Science and engineering ethics special issue on experiments, ethics, and new technologies, 2015. doi:10.1007/s11948-015-9634-4.
Rawseeds. (2015). The rawseeds project. http://www.rawseeds.org/home/. Last accessed November 2015.
RoCKIn. (2015). Robot competitions kick innovation. In Cognitive systems and robotics (RoCKIn). http://rockinrobotchallenge.eu. Last accessed November 2015.
Steinle, F. (1997). Entering new fields: Exploratory uses of experimentation. Philosophy of Science, 64, S65–S67.
Tedre, M. (2011). Computing as a science: A survey of computing viewpoints. Minds and Machines, 21, 361–387.
Tedre, M. (2015). The science of computing. Boca Raton: CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.
Tenorth, M., Perzylo, A., Lafrenz, R., & Beetz, M. (2012). The RoboEarth language: Representing and exchanging knowledge about actions, objects, and environments. In Proceedings of ICRA, 2012 (pp. 1284–1289).
Thobbi, A., Gu, Y., & Sheng, W. (2011). Using human motion estimation for human-robot cooperative manipulation. In Proceedings of IROS, 2011 (pp. 2873–2878).
Vermaas, P., Kroes, P., van de Poel, I., Franssen, M., & Houkes, W. (2011). A philosophy of technology. From technical artifacts to sociotechnical systems. San Rafael: Morgan & Claypool.
Waters, C. K. (2007). The nature and context of exploratory experimentation. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 19, 275–284.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this paper
Cite this paper
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-38983-7_33
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-38982-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-38983-7
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)