Performance evaluation of pure-motion tasks for mobile robots with respect to world models

Survey of Research for Performance Measurement of Mobile Manipulators

This survey provides the basis for developing research in the area of mobile manipulator performance measurement, an area that has relatively few research articles when compared to other mobile manipulator research areas. The survey provides a literature review of mobile manipulator research with examples of experimental applications. The survey also provides an extensive list of planning and control references as this has been the major research focus for mobile manipulators which factors into performance measurement of the system. The survey then reviews performance metrics considered for mobile robots, robot arms, and mobile manipulators and the systems that measure their performance, including machine tool measurement systems through dynamic motion tracking systems. Lastly, the survey includes a section on research that has occurred for performance measurement of robots, mobile robots, and mobile manipulators beginning with calibration, standards, and mobile manipulator artifacts that are being considered for evaluation of mobile manipulator performance.

Robot trajectories comparison: a statistical approach

The task of planning a collision-free trajectory from a start to a goal position is fundamental for an autonomous mobile robot. Although path planning has been extensively investigated since the beginning of robotics, there is no agreement on how to measure the performance of a motion algorithm. This paper presents a new approach to perform robot trajectories comparison that could be applied to any kind of trajectories and in both simulated and real environments. Given an initial set of features, it automatically selects the most significant ones and performs a statistical comparison using them. Additionally, a graphical data visualization named polygraph which helps to better understand the obtained results is provided. The proposed method has been applied, as an example, to compare two different motion planners, FM² and WaveFront, using different environments, robots, and local planners.

Behavior coordination of mobile robotics using supervisory control of fuzzy discrete event systems

In order to incorporate the uncertainty and impreciseness present in real-world event-driven asynchronous systems, fuzzy discrete event systems (DESs) (FDESs) have been proposed as an extension to crisp DESs. In this paper, first, we propose an extension to the supervisory control theory of FDES by redefining fuzzy controllable and uncontrollable events. The proposed supervisor is capable of enabling feasible uncontrollable and controllable events with different possibilities. Then, the extended supervisory control framework of FDES is employed to model and control several navigational tasks of a mobile robot using the behavior-based approach. The robot has limited sensory capabilities, and the navigations have been performed in several unmodeled environments. The reactive and deliberative behaviors of the mobile robotic system are weighted through fuzzy uncontrollable and controllable events, respectively. By employing the proposed supervisory controller, a command-fusion-type behavior coordination is achieved. The observability of fuzzy events is incorporated to represent the sensory imprecision. As a systematic analysis of the system, a fuzzy-state-based controllability measure is introduced. The approach is implemented in both simulation and real time. A performance evaluation is performed to quantitatively estimate the validity of the proposed approach over its counterparts.