A Human Motion-Based Environment Complexity Measure for Robotics

This paper describes how environmental complexity measures can be employed in the process of validating experimental robotics work. We advocate the use of metrics that attempt to quantify the “difficulty” in movement for a given environment. Both space syntactical methods (from the urban and building design literature) and fluid-flow models (used in crowd modelling) are introduced as relevant to mobile robotics domains. We show experimentally that these two metrics give very different expressions of complexity and discuss how the different metrics thus may be applied to robotics controller design and evaluation.