Evaluation of Wheel-based Mobile Robot Performance for Simple Environmental Obstacles

For the evaluation of the mobile robot performance in complex environments, the experimental approach in an actual physical environment has been commonly taken. In the physical experimental approach, however, it is quite difficult to define the proper environment for the evaluation due to the lack of commonly agreed characteristics of the test environment. Particularly the number of combinations of types and physical parameters of the obstacles that the mobile robot is expected to deal with is practically unlimited. In an effort to simplify and improve the effectiveness of the evaluation process, we propose an evaluation method using decomposed environmental elements, where we evaluated the performance of the robot for a small group of simple and decomposed obstacle components, for examples projection and slope, instead of a large group of complicated random obstacles. The paper describes a set of simple obstacle models and performance parameters that we have chosen for the effective evaluation process. As an alternative to the physical experimental evaluation approach, in this paper, we used a virtual evaluation environment where the robot and the physical test environment has been modeled using a commercial multi-body dynamics analysis packaged called RecurDyn.