Quantitative Assessment of Robot-generated Maps

Mobile robotic mapping is now considered to be a sufficiently mature field with demonstrated successes in various domains. While there has been much progress made in the development of computationally efficient and consistent mapping schemes, it is still murky at best on how these maps can be evaluated. We are motivated by the absence of an accepted standard for quantitatively measuring the performance of robotic mapping systems against user-defined requirements. It is our belief that the development of standardized methods for quantitatively evaluating existing robotic technologies will improve the utility of mobile robots in already established application areas, such as vacuum cleaning, robot surveillance, and bomb disposal, but will also enable the proliferation and acceptance of such technologies in other emerging markets. This Chapter summarizes our preliminary efforts by bringing together the research community towards addressing this important problem which has ramifications not only from a research perspective but also from consumers’, robot manufacturers’, and developers’ viewpoints. C. Scrapper, R. Madhavan, A. Jacoff Intelligent Systems Division, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA, e-mail: [email protected],raj.madhavan@nist. gov,[email protected] R. Lakaemper Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 19122, USA, e-mail: [email protected] A. Censi Control & Dynamical Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA, e-mail: [email protected] A. Godil, A. Wagan Information Technology Laboratory, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Gaithersburg, MD 20899, USA, e-mail: [email protected],asim.wagan@nist.