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

The evaluation of the performance of robot motion methods and systems is still an open challenge, although substantial progress has been made in the field over the years. On the one hand, these techniques cannot be evaluated off-line, on the other hand, they are deeply influenced by the task, the environment and the specific representation chosen for it. In this paper we concentrate on "pure-motion tasks": tasks that require to move the robot from one configuration to another, either being an independent sub-task of a more complex plan or representing a goal by itself. After characterizing the goals and the tasks, we describe the commonly-used problem decomposition and different kinds of modeling that can be used, from accurate metric maps to minimalistic representations. The contribution of this paper is an evaluation framework that we adopt in a set of experiments showing how the performance of the motion system can be affected by the use of different kinds of environment representations.