hi Bill,

First off, let me say that we wholeheartedly support your desire to
enable reproduction of your experiments.  It's a practice from which
the community will benefit greatly.

We've been doing some work in this vein, which you can see in the wiki:
  http://www.ros.org/wiki/Papers
The idea is to create a page for each paper (unpublished experiments
could also go there), with enough information to run the experiment
yourself.  In an ideal world, the reader would be able to recreate the
graphs or tables that appear in the paper.  A good example is this
ICRA 2010 paper:
  http://www.ros.org/wiki/Papers/ICRA2010_Marder-Eppstein
Toward the bottom are instructions for getting and compiling the code,
and running the experiments that are reported on in the paper, both in
simulation and on the robot (if you happen to have a robot of the sort
that was used).

NOTE: The Papers page in the ros.org wiki is open to everybody.   We
encourage other ROS users to put up pages describing their papers.

Now, to your question of where to keep the code: so far, we've been
putting packages dedicated our experimental results in our sandbox.
E.g., the ICRA paper I mentioned relies on a package called
'icra_navigation_gazebo', which does get indexed into
http://www.ros.org/browse/list.php .

As you point out, it might be good to filter this sort of package out
of the rosbrowse list.  Perhaps we could add support for a
robots.txt-like file that maintainers can drop in parts of their repos
to tell rosbrowse to go away.

	brian.

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 10:59 AM, Bill Morris <morris@ee.ccny.cuny.edu> wrote:
> Here at the CCNY Robotics Lab we are looking at archiving our
> experimental results. We want to be able to provide enough information
> so that our results can be reproduced easily.
>
> Currently we are debating the creation of a separate repository
> ccny-ros-exp which would contain installers and launch files necessary
> to rerun our experiments. This approach in nice in that it keeps from
> cluttering up our main repository and most users of our code won't
> require our experimental data. The downside is that it clutters up the
> ROS list of repositories.
>
> Perhaps there should be a separate page like this
> http://www.ros.org/browse/repo_list.php just for experimental results.
> This could also be indexed so that you could look at a sensor message
> and have a list of experiments that used that message. I'm sure there
> are other benefits that could be found.
>
> Does anyone have any opinions or feedback on creating a separate
> repository for experimental data?
>
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