European Land Robot Trial (ELROB). Towards a realistic benchmark for outdoor robotics

The European Land Robotic Trial (ELROB), which was held for the fifth time in 2010, is designed to compare unmanned ground vehicles in realistic outdoor tasks. It addresses the need to create a benchmark that can reproducibly compare and evaluate different robot systems. While robot trials like the DARPA Grand Challenge or the RoboCup have proven to be adequate benchmarks to compare robots systems in specific scenarios, the ELROB provides benchmarking in a wide range of tasks, which are oriented at prospective use-cases from a large variety of applications. In this paper we describe the ELROB 2010, the rationale behind the scenario design and how the trial has been implemented. We present the benchmarking system used to evaluate the robots' performance in the different tasks and, finally, have a closer look at some exemplary results.