Quantitative analysis of robot-environment interaction - towards "scientific mobile robotics"

Quantitative descriptions of a physical system’s behaviour form the backbone of the scientific method used in the natural sciences. They allow the principled determination of experimental parameters, a clear and unambiguous representation of experiments, and independent replication and verification of experimental results. In mobile robotics to date, quantitative descriptions of robot-environment interaction remain the exception, chiefly due to the lack of those descriptions. Instead, qualitative descriptions of experiments and existence proofs (i.e. unvalidated experimental results) are the norm. This paper discusses this problem, and presents a novel method of describing robot-environment interaction quantitatively — a first step towards scientific mobile robotics. The application of this novel method is illustrated on an example taken from mobile robotics: the comparison between a Nomad 200 mobile robot and its computer model.