Steps Towards the Automatic Evaluation of Robot Obstacle Avoidance Algorithms

This paper presents the first steps towards the evaluation of obstacle avoidance techniques for mobile robots. The idea is to create a methodology to evaluate the performance of the methods given a wide range of work conditions. The work conditions usually include scenarios with very different nature (dense, complex, cluttered, etc). The performance is measured in terms of robotic parameters (robustness, optimality, safety, etc). We describe in this paper the overall methodology that we intend to apply and the first steps in the scenario characterization.