Functionalities, Benchmarking System and Performance Evaluation for a Domestic Service Robot: People Perception, People Following, and Pick and Placing

This paper describes the development of three main functionalities for a domestic mobile service robot and an automatic benchmarking system used for the systematic performance evaluation of the robot’s functionalities. Three main robot functionalities are addressed: (1) People Perception, (2) People Following and (3) Pick and Placing, where the hardware and software systems developed for each functionality are described and demonstrated on an actual mobile service robot, with the goal of providing assistance to an elderly person inside the house. Furthermore, a set of innovative benchmarks and an automatic performance evaluation system are proposed and used to evaluate the performance of the developed functionalities. These benchmarks are now made publicly available and is part of the European Robotics League (ERL)-Consumer to systematically evaluate the performance of service robot solutions at different testbeds around Europe.