DevOps in Robotics: Challenges and Practices

DevOps, which refers to a set of practices for streamlining the development and operations of software companies, is becoming increasingly popular as businesses strive to adopt a loosely coupled architecture that supports frequent software delivery. As a result, DevOps is also gaining traction in other domains and involved architectures, including robotics, though research in this area is still lacking. To address this gap, this paper investigates how to adapt key DevOps principles from the domain of software engineering to the domain of robotics. In order to demonstrate the feasibility of this in practice, an industrial robotics case study is conducted. The results indicate that the adoption of these principles is also beneficial for robotic software architectures, though general DevOps approaches may require some adaptation to match the existing infrastructure.