Special Issue on Open Source Software-Supported Robotics Research

Historically, robotics research has been disseminated through academic papers which lacked important implementation details, or one-time demonstrations of functionality. Neither of these methods has been conducive to either repeatable science, nor to building upon previous work. A shift is happening, however. The increasing distribution and use of open source software within robotics is moving the field to a model in which code is distributed, repeatedly executed and built upon. This cultural shift has the potential to accelerate robotics development by encouraging robust algorithms, algorithm comparison, and collaborations between research groups. Additionally, this shift should prevent new graduate students from reimplementing commonalgorithms.This special issue of Autonomous Robots is dedicated to exploring the use of open source software within a research context. Creating and disseminating usable software is timeconsuming. It involves re-writing prototype software to be