Benchmarking and standardization of intelligent robotic systems

From mundane and repetitive tasks to assisting first responders in saving lives of victims in disaster scenarios, robots are expected to play an important role in our lives in the coming years. Despite recent advances in mobile robotic systems, lack of widely accepted performance metrics and standards hinder the progress in many application areas such as manufacturing, healthcare, and search and rescue. In this paper, we outline the importance of the development of standardized methods and objective performance evaluation/benchmarking of existing and emerging robotic technologies. We provide a survey of significant past efforts by researchers and developers around the globe and discuss how we can leverage such efforts in advancing the state-of-the-art. Using an example of designing a dasiastandardpsila evaluation toolkit for robotic mapping, we illustrate some of the problems faced in developing objective performance metrics whilst accommodating the requirements and restrictions imposed by the intended domain of operation and other practical considerations.