Towards evaluating world modeling for autonomous navigation in unstructured and dynamic environments

With funding from the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Measurement Science and Engineering Research Grants, the authors have recently embarked on a three year project to create and experimentally validate a framework by which automated guided vehicles (AGVs) can automatically generate a sufficiently accurate internal map (world model) of its surroundings. The work presented in this paper discusses challenges involved and reports on a possible extension to a previously-developed mapping technique in evaluating world models of such dynamic and unstructured environments. The paper also reports on the authors' views in bringing together the community to collectively address this problem from end-users', vendors' and developers' points of view.