  Robot deployment in realistic dynamic environments is a challenging problem
despite the fact that robots can be quite skilled at a large number of isolated
tasks. One reason for this is that robots are rarely equipped with powerful
introspection capabilities, which means that they cannot always deal with
failures in a reasonable manner; in addition, manual diagnosis is often a
tedious task that requires technicians to have a considerable set of robotics
skills. In this paper, we discuss our ongoing efforts - in the context of the
ROPOD project - to address some of these problems. In particular, we (i)
present our early efforts at developing a robotic black box and consider some
factors that complicate its design, (ii) explain our component and system
monitoring concept, and (iii) describe the necessity for remote monitoring and
experimentation as well as our initial attempts at performing those. Our
preliminary work opens a range of promising directions for making robots more
usable and reliable in practice - not only in the context of ROPOD, but in a
more general sense as well.
