Online Tool for Benchmarking of Simulated Intervention Autonomous Underwater Vehicles: Evaluating Position Controllers in Changing Underwater Currents

Benchmarking is nowadays an issue on robotic research platforms, due to the fact that it is not easy to reproduce previous experiments and knowing in detail in which real conditions other algorithms have been performed. Having a web-based tool to configure and execute benchmarks opens the door to new opportunities as the design of virtual tele-laboratories that permit the implementation of new algorithms using specific and detailed constraints. This is fundamental for designing benchmarks that allow the experiments to be made in a more scientific manner, taking into account that these experiments should be able to be reproduced again by other people under the same circumstances. In the context of underwater interventions with semi-autonomous robots, the situation gets even more interesting, specially those performed on real sea scenarios, which are expensive, and difficult to perform and reproduce. This paper presents the recent advances in the online configuration tool for benchmarking, a tool that is continuously being improved in our laboratory. Our last contribution focuses on evaluating position controllers for changing underwater currents and the possibility for the user to upload its own controllers to the benchmarking tool to get online performance results.