Evaluation of Mobility and Navigation Performance for Personal Robots

Evaluation of Mobility and Navigation Performance for Personal Robots

  In this paper, we propose a method to evaluate the performance of mobile personal robots. A set of performance measures is proposed and the corresponding evaluation methods are developed. Different from industrial manipulators, personal robots need to be evaluated for their mobility, navigation, work, and intelligent performance in environments where human beings exist. Proposed performance measures are composed of measures for mobility including vibration, repeatability, path accuracy, and so on, as well as measures for navigation performance including wall following, overcoming doorsills, obstacle avoidance, and localization. However, work and intelligent behavior performance such as cleaning capability and high-level decision-making are not considered in this paper. To measure the proposed performances after a set of tests, we designed a standard test environment and developed measurement systems including a 3D Laser tracking system, a vision monitoring system, and a vibration measurement system. We measured the proposed performances with a mobile robot to show the results as an example.