Scientific methods in mobile robotics

✍ Scribed by Ulrich Nehmzow; Michael Recce

• Book ID: 104357346
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 202 KB
• Volume: 24
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0921-8890
• DOI: 10.1016/s0921-8890(98)00017-7

✦ Synopsis

The first UK conference "Towards Intelligent Mobile Robots" (TIMR '97) was held in 1997 in Manchester. It brought together an international group of mobile robot researchers with the goal to identify ways in which the field can develop beyond results that are merely "existence proofs", and move towards results that are quantitative and reproducible on different platforms and in different environments. This process includes the development of metrics and analysis tools that can put mobile robotics research on the road towards becoming a more scientific discipline, where key experiments are replicated and important findings are verified.

This special issue of Robotics and Autonomous Systems collects some of the contributions to TIMR '97. It demonstrates a trend towards using quantitative methods in mobile robotics research, and shows that the community shares some common research practices. We do not yet have the research practice of natural sciences such as biochemistry or physics, where resuits are corroborated by independent research groups before they are accepted by the community, but the tools for such a practice are emerging. Mobile robotics is not a natural science, in that we are constructing new artificial autonomous systems, not analysing natural phenomena. However, it is closely related to the natural sciences, since many processes underlying the behaviour of mobile robots are rooted in natural phenomena.