PERFORMANCE EVALUATION AND BENCHMARKING FOR UNMANNED GROUND VEHICLES

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) are being fielded with increasing frequency for military applications. However, there is a lack of agreed upon standards, definitions, performance metrics, and evaluation procedures for UGVs. UGV design, development, and deployability have suffered from the lack of accepted standards and metrics. Developing these standards is exceptionally difficult, because any performance metric must not only be evaluated through controlled experiments, but the metric itself must also be checked for relevance. Several committees and workgroups have taken up the challenge of providing standardized performance metrics, and an overview of the current state of performance evaluation for UGVs is presented. The ability to evaluate a potential metric through simulations would greatly enable these work efforts. To that end, an overview of the Virtual Autonomous Navigation Environment (VANE) computational test bed (CTB) and its potential use in the rapid development of meaningful UGV performance metrics is presented.