Quality Management for Mobile Robot Development

Abstract

Robot programs have to be tested systematically on a daily basis in order to improve robot performance in a controlled way. This requires automated support. We present a framework in which the designer can specify a number of test cases and metrics which are then executed by a simulator off-line. 1 Introduction Today, robots are no longer bound to factories but appear in open (i.e. non-deterministic form the robot's point of view) environments, for instance, homes, museums, or soccer fields. Improving the performance of mobile robots is not straightforward. Often performance declines dramatically because of changes in the environment setting, or after changes in the program which controls the robot, the robot program. Investigations of such phenomena often reveal that the robot program is overfitted with respect to the test environment and a few test experiments. Overfitting means that the robot program contains assumptions which match perfectly to simplifications and errors contain...