On the role of quantitative descriptions of behaviour in mobile robotics research

This paper - a summary of a keynote address given at the Robocup 2003 symposium - argues i) that mobile robotics research would benefit from a theoretical understanding of robot-environment interaction, ii) that independent replication and verification of experimental results should become common practice within robotics research, and iii) that quantitative measures of robot behaviour are needed to achieve this. The paper gives one example of such quantitative measures of behaviour: the reconstruction of the phase space describing a robot's behaviour, and its subsequent analysis using chaos theory.