Quantitative Analysis of Mobile Robot Localisation Systems

This paper addresses the question of how to measure the performance of mobile robot localisation systems. A general performance metric and a standard experimental procedure are introduced, where no semantic interpretation of the robot's internal world model is required. A novel mechanism for tracking the \true" location of the robot is also presented. Together, these methods facilitate the comparison of disparate localisation systems on the same robot in the same environment, and also the replication of such experiments by other researchers. To demonstrate the utility of the approach taken, three diierent localisation systems are compared using the same data collected by a real robot travelling over a route of 175m.