Performance Indices for Evaluation and Comparison of Unmanned Marine Vehicles' Guidance Systems

Guidance and control system development for Unmanned Marine Vehicles is a well known and consolidated issue, but a general guideline for quantitatively measuring the performance of robotic systems and comparing them is still lacking in the literature. The importance of establishing standards to follow has become more and more stronger, in particular whenever heterogeneous platforms are employed in a common framework. This work focuses on the definition and exploitation of performance indices for marine robotics applications, paying special attention to path-following tasks. Theoretical formalisations for the considered indices, as well as experimental results proving their effectiveness, are reported.