Interactive benchmark for planning algorithms on the Web: http:.//www.piaggio.ccii.unipi.it/benchplanning.html

This paper presents an interactive environment available on the WorldWide Web intended to allow fair and thorough comparison of different techniques to solve a basic problem in nonholonomic motion planning. By connecting to the server, the user, potentially unaware of the technical subtleties of the planning problem, but well conscious of his application needs, can design the benchmark problem that is most significant to his purposes. The user can then obtain different solutions from several algorithm providers, and compare them both qualitatively (by graphic display), and quantitatively. Providers implement their own algorithms at their sites, with wide freedom of choice in programming language, computational architecture, etc., while complying with few simple protocol conventions. It is believed that similar usage of the Web, easily extendable to other domains, can usefully contribute to the fair comparison of results among researchers, as well as to the diffusion of advanced research results towards application oriented users