Metrics for evaluation of behaviour-based robotic systems

Abstract

This research focuses on robot behaviours which use minimal communication and rely mostly on changes in the environment as their cue for action. The behaviour-based paradigm for building autonomous robots has recently become very popular because of its successes, use of the world as an external memory and replacement of classical planning by agent-environment dynamics. However there are no metrics for evaluating and improving the behaviour spaces. Our aim here is to bridge this gap. We define novel metrics (power, usefulness, flexibility, modularity and scalability) and investigate the properties of behaviour spaces using them. We use these metrics to present results on modifications to individual behaviours and addition of new behaviours to the behaviour spaces. We discuss the case of a behaviour-based robot operating in kitchen to illustrate the significance of our metrics and discuss how the utility of our metrics remains valid in other behaviour representations.