A layered metric definition and evaluation framework for multirobot systems

Abstract

In order to accomplish it successfully, the top-level goal of a multi-robot team should be decomposed into a sequence of sub-goals and proper sequences of actions for achieving these subgoals should be selected and refined through execution. Selecting the proper actions at any given time requires the ability to evaluate the current state of the environment, which can be achieved by using metrics that give quantitative information about the environment. Defining appropriate metrics is already a challenging problem; however, it is even harder to assess the performance of individual metrics. This work proposes a layered evaluation scheme for robot soccer where the environment is represented in different time resolutions at each layer. A set of metrics defined on these layers together with a novel metric validation method for assessing the performance of the defined metrics are proposed. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.