The Pc metric: A performance measure for collision avoidance algorithms

Despite the comprehensive development in the field of navigation algorithms for mobile robots, the research on performance metrics and evaluation procedures for making standardized quantitative comparison between different algorithms has gained attention only recently. This work attempts to contribute with such effort by introducing a performance metric for the assessment of collision avoidance algorithms for mobile robots. The proposed metric comprehensively evaluates the actions taken by the objects and their consequences, in a given scenario of any given collision avoidance algorithm, based on the concept of probability of collision. The contribution of the paper encompasses the definition of the metric, the methodology to estimate the metric, and the framework to apply the metric for any given scenario. Experiments and numerical simulations are conducted to validate and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed metric in performance evaluation and comparison among different collision avoidance algorithms.