I spatially integrate and therefore i am… Lost? A benchmark measuring environment modelling performance

Abstract This paper presents a novel benchmarking toolkit suitable for quantitatively evaluating the performance of environment modelling systems, thus allowing comparisons to be made. The benchmark measure is based on re-localisation, itself a practical navigation task and is demonstrated on a biomimetic survey navigation model developed within our research group and implemented on an autonomous mobile robot. The results show that the benchmark can usefully quantify an implementation of the model, based on predefined criteria, and can be used to optimally tune model parameters.