Have you ever used a robotics simulator? Do you have ideas for how robotics simulators might be improved? We want to hear from you! We are a group of software engineering researchers at Carnegie Mellon University trying to better understand why and how robotics developers use simulation when developing and testing their systems.
Simulation holds the potential to provide an automated, cost-effective, and scalable alternative to the manual and expensive process of field testing. Numerous companies in the autonomy sector, such as Uber, NVIDIA, and Waymo, have begun to use simulation on a large scale to aid the testing and development of their products.
Motivated by this potential, we want to learn why, when, and how developers are using simulation to develop and test their robotics software, and the reasons that developers opt not to use simulation. We hope that the results of our study can be used to provide guidance to developers and researchers on building the next generation of simulation platforms that better serve the needs of developers.
I would be interested in knowing the results of this survey. Do you mind sharing?
I am a program manager at Microsoft and I am trying to better understand developer experience while building robotic solutions.
We plan to make the raw (anonymised) data and summarised results of the survey available on a study website following double-blind review. We will email the URL of the website to all of the participants of the study that marked that they would be interested in the results. We will also post the results here on ROS Discourse.
I’m afraid that @GimpelZhang is right. We won’t be submitting the associated paper until early next year, so we won’t be publicly releasing the data anytime soon. @roycey, I’ve sent you a private message.
