Evaluation and comparison of navigation guidance and control systems for 2D surface path-following

Robotics nowadays is a mature discipline. For its widespread employment in real civilian scenarios, in close contacts with humans, additional efforts are needed to establish standards and common procedures to evaluate and assess robot performance. A methodology for performance evaluation is here proposed and some indices are formalized for the evaluation of robot behaviours against different criteria. The indices are tested on a number of experiments with unmanned marine vehicles, from different field campaigns and in different scenarios.