Development and verification of a simulation for leveraging results of a human subjects programming experiment

Quantitatively evaluating and comparing the performance of robotic solutions that are designed to work under a variety of conditions is inherently challenging because they need to be evaluated under numerous precisely repeatable conditions Manually acquiring this data is time consuming and imprecise. A deterministic simulation can reproduce the conditions and can evaluate the solutions autonomously, faster and statistically significantly. We developed such a simulation designated to leverage data from a human-subject experiment post-experimentally. We present the development of the simulation and the verification that it actually reproduces the results obtained with the physical robot. The aim of this publication is to provide insight into the development details such that other researchers can replicate the setup and to show the degree of validity of the simulation.