The 1,000-km Challenge: Insights and Quantitative and Qualitative Results

On 18 November 2014, a team of four autonomous CoBot robots reached 1,000-km of overall autonomous navigation, as a result of a 1,000-km challenge that the authors had set three years earlier. The authors are frequently asked for the lessons learned, as well as the performance results. In this article, they introduce the challenge and contribute a detailed presentation of technical insights as well as quantitative and qualitative results. They have previously presented the algorithms for the individual technical contributions, namely robot localization, symbiotic robot autonomy, and robot task scheduling. In this article, they present the data collected over the 1,000-km challenge and analyze it to evaluate the accuracy and robustness of the localization algorithms on the CoBots. Furthermore, they present technical insights into the algorithms, which they believe are responsible for the robots' continuous robust performance.