1. Introduction

This page provides orientation and an overall introduction to the repository. It is a good place to begin before studying a particular benchmark. There are two founding ambitions of the project: to develop benchmark problems for research in so-called “formal methods for robotics,” and to create standard interfaces, formats, etc. for expressing problems and using tools that implement methods described in the research literature. Our effort is analogous to that of SMT-LIB, which is for research in satisfiability modulo theories.

There are four major kinds of entities in the repository:

  1. benchmarks;
  2. analysis tools for reviewing results from using benchmarks;
  3. examples demonstrating components of benchmarks and solution controllers;
  4. documentation.

Spanning all four of the above kinds is the supporting infrastructure. This refers to header files, message formats, etc. that may be used by more than one benchmark and that may be of independent interest, besides benchmarking.

The repository as a whole has a single version number. Depending on the eventual pace of growth and styles of usage, we may begin to version significant components separately. In any case, version numbers are of the form M.m.u, and changes only to u are not expected to break any current usage.

Warning

The interfaces to command-line tools, the names of important ROS topics, and other user-level aspects of the repository may change with little warning until version 0.1.0. Beginning at that time, care will be taken to ensure backwards-compatibility and to have more gradual deprecation.

1.1. Formulation

A normative description of benchmarks as well as a development of notation and problem formulation is given in the Challenge Document. Below is a summary.

Benchmarks are organized into problem domains (sometimes also called “problem settings”), which are defined in terms of several parameters. A problem variant refines the domain by constraining possible values that may be assigned to a parameter, e.g., deciding that time can only be a multiple of a constant (the period). Finally, a problem instance is defined as a particular selection of values consistent with a problem variant. The instance is the thing that is actually to be solved. A special case of this taxonomy is a concrete benchmark from industry that is to be solved as given, i.e., there is no need to provide more details like how time progresses or what the initial state can be. In such a case, the problem domain, variant, and instance are all the same.

1.2. Support for platforms and programming languanges

There are no generic installation instructions. Instead, instructions and requirements are described separately for each benchmark. Though there are shared dependencies and some similar preparations, separately treating each facilitates users who are only interested in some parts of the repository. E.g., try the Problem domain: Scaling chains of integrators.

While it may be possible to build the benchmarks and infrastructure on other platforms, the current target is Ubuntu 14.04 running Linux x86_64 and the following:

The benchmarks are primarily implemented in C++ and C. As of version 0.0.0, most of the examples and tools for reviewing results are in C++ and Python.