  In an increasingly automated world -- from warehouse robots to self-driving
cars -- streamlining the development and deployment process and operations of
robotic applications becomes ever more important. Automated DevOps processes
and microservice architectures have already proven successful in other domains
such as large-scale customer-oriented web services (e.g., Netflix). We
recommend to employ similar microservice architectures for the deployment of
small- to large-scale robotic applications in order to accelerate development
cycles, loosen functional dependence, and improve resiliency and elasticity. In
order to facilitate involved DevOps processes, we present and release a tooling
suite for automating the development of microservices for robotic applications
based on the Robot Operating System (ROS). Our tooling suite covers the
automated minimal containerization of ROS applications, a collection of useful
machine learning-enabled base container images, as well as a CLI tool for
simplified interaction with container images during the development phase.
Within the scope of this paper, we embed our tooling suite into the overall
context of streamlined robotics deployment and compare it to alternative
solutions. We release our tools as open-source software at
https://github.com/ika-rwth-aachen/dorotos.
