Metrics for evaluation of behavior-based robotic systems

This research focuses on robot behaviors which use minimal communication and rely mostly on changes in the environment as their cue for action. The behavior-based paradigm for building autonomous robots has recently become very popular because of its successes, use of the world as an external memory and replacement of classical planning by agent-environment dynamics. However there are no metrics for evaluating and improving the behavior spaces. Our aim here is to bridge this gap. We define novel metrics (power, usefulness, flexibility, modularity and scalability) and investigate the properties of behavior spaces using them. We use these metrics to present results on modifications to individual behaviors and addition of new behaviors to the behavior spaces. We discuss the case of a behavior-based robot operating in kitchen to illustrate the significance of our metrics and discuss how the utility of our metrics remains valid in other behavior representations.