Serket-SDE: A Containerized Software Development Environment for the Symbol Emergence in Robotics Toolkit

The rapid deployment of intelligent robots to perform service tasks has become an increasingly complex challenge for researchers due to the number of disciplines and skills involved. Therefore, this paper introduces Serket-SDE, a containerized Software Development Environment (SDE) for the Symbol Emergence in Robotics Toolkit (Serket) that relies on open-source technologies to build cognitive robotic systems from multimodal sensor observations. The main contribution of Serket-SDE is an integrated framework that allows users to rapidly compose, scale, and deploy probabilistic generative models with robots. The description of Serket-SDE is accompanied by demonstrations of unsupervised multimodal categorizations using a mobile robot in various simulation environments. Further extensions of the Serket-SDE framework are discussed in conclusion based on the demonstrated results.