Discussion of Exemplary Metrics for Multi-Robot Systems for Formation Navigation

This work addresses the problem of metrics for multi-robot systems. It is often desirable to compare different strategies or algorithms for similar problems, e.g. mapping or localization. Since these are often real time applications, classical criterions like time or space complexity are not very helpful. Several other metrics have been suggested. In this paperformation navigation is used as an example application. Possible metrics are presented and discussed, and two of them are used to exemplarily evaluate the results of several formation experiments. Problems and drawbacks of these metrics are discussed and preconditions for a general metricfor the formation problem are adumbrated. Finally, first steps towards a generic and generally applicable metric are presented by means of simulation experiments.