Good Experimental Methodologies for Autonomous Robotics: From Theory to Practice

A lively discussion on good experimental methodologies has recently taken place in the autonomous robotics community. Workshops have been organized, special issues published, and projects funded after recognizing that experimentation in autonomous robotics has not yet reached a level of maturity comparable with other fields of engineering and science. Within this discussion, we are not aware of any systematic survey on how experiments are conducted in autonomous robotics papers published in major journals and conferences. In this chapter, we provide an initial contribution to fill this gap by analyzing the experimental trends that emerge from the autonomous robotics papers presented over the last 11 years at the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS), which constitute a privileged sample to get a picture on the evolution of experimental activity in the area. We conduct our analysis in the light of some principles that have been proposed for the development of good experimental methodologies in autonomous robotics.