DOS®: A Deployment Operating System for Robots

Abstract

We propose a new system named DOS®(Deployment Operating System for Robots) for reliably deploying any data-driven robots in both production and simulation environments. Compared to existing systems, DOS® features a unique CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous deployment) architecture which allows us to seamlessly integrate agile development and reliable operation in a fully automated fashion. With this CI/CD architecture, this paper mainly introduces three essential components that uniquely differentiate DOS® from existing robotic systems: (i) An environment adapter that provides a systematic and robust approach to handle the deployment complexity in real world environments; (ii) A data replay reservoir that provides a unified data model supporting arbitrary robotic decision models; (iii) An analytical profiler that collects any set of user-defined performance metrics for system optimization. DOS® significantly increases the reliability and maintainability of the deployed robotic systems. To illustrate this point, we compare DOS® with more traditional approaches on deploying a navigational robot in a challenging working environment with many new corner case scenarios. Our results show that DOS® outperforms traditional approach in great magnitudes in terms of deployment time and operational robustness.