FineCycle: Towards a Full-Cycle Management Paradigm for Robotic Deployment and Development
Haolin Wang, Wang Xi, Zhiyuan Zhu, Chongrong Fang, Jianping He
AI summary
Problem
Cross-host robotic deployment is hindered by tedious environment configuration, while existing containerization solutions lack integrated development environments, forcing repetitive rebuilding and slowing iterative development.
Approach
The authors introduce FINECYCLE, a paradigm that encapsulates the OS, dependencies, and development tools into a single robotic disk image, leveraging hardware virtualization and tiered deployment strategies to enable seamless bidirectional image circulation and iterative development.
Key results
- Proposes a full-cycle management paradigm integrating unified storage, bidirectional deployment, and iterative development.
- Validates three tiered deployment strategies (CLM, CDC, DDC) for virtualized and bare-metal robotic hosts.
- Demonstrates that hardware virtualization introduces minimal overhead without compromising robotic application performance.
- Releases an open-source, standardized robotic image template with pre-configured OS, ROS 2, and development tools.
Why it matters
It removes repetitive environment setup for robotics researchers and developers, accelerating iterative development and fleet-wide deployment across heterogeneous hardware.
Abstract
Typical robotic workflows involve deploying ap- plications from servers to robots for testing or distributing validated applications across a fleet to unify capabilities. Be- cause these processes are often slowed by tedious environment configurations, we need a way to improve deployment and development efficiency. Existing solutions typically simplify deployment through containerization; however, they often lack integrated development environments, necessitating repetitive packaging for code modifications and hindering iterative ef- ficiency. This paper proposes FINECYCLE, a management paradigm that encapsulates the entire software stack into a robotic image. By facilitating a complete "deploy-develop-store" cycle, FINECYCLE streamlines the transition between cross-host deployment and iterative refinement. Additionally, we open- source image templates compatible with this paradigm to reduce time costs for researchers and foster collaborative progress in the robotics community.