Human motion-based environment complexity measures for robotics

This paper describes how environmental complexity measures can be employed in the process of validating experimental robotics work. We advocate the use of metrics that attempt to quantify the ´difficulty´ of motion for a given environment. Space syntax methods (from the urban and building design literature) and fluid-flow models (used in crowd modeling) are described and proposed as relevant measures for mobile robotics domains. We show experimentally that these two metrics give very different expressions of complexity. We then discuss how, given their properties, these different metrics may be applied to robotics controller design and evaluation.