Performance Metrics for Robot Coverage Tasks

Applications that require a robot to cover an area can be described as complete coverage navigation tasks. Examples of this type of navigation are vacuuming, surface coating, and systematic foraging. Performance measures are often neglected in this area of research. This paper presents two metrics for measuring performance of robot coverage tasks and applied them to a real robot coverage experiment. The first metric measures percentage of coverage using computer vision techniques. The second metric uses distance travelled by the robot. It is found that percentage of coverage is a good performance indicator if physical limitations of the robot is taken into account; while distance travelled by itself is a poor indicator because it completely ignores the amount of area covered.

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