Generic Acceptance Test Strategy for Mobile Robots' Navigation Algorithms: Applied in a Health Care Environment

The market for mobile robots supporting the work in non-industrial environments is increasing. Mobile robots are sold to millions of households and reached a reliability recommending them for professional environments as eHealth environments. Robots of today might not be designed for such demanding areas, but they evolve in this direction. For nontechnical users there is no advice available how they can test robots for their environment. Former studies indicated some areas which might be important to be tested, but at the end no concrete strategy to derive test cases or scenarios have been provided. A concrete generic test strategy is developed, starting with the advices derived from a literature study. The derived generic test strategy was then evaluated by using it for a concrete scenario. We used one of the most reliable household robots, the Roomba from iRobot for a challenging hospital environment. The evaluation showed that there is a high risk to miss out critical situations and that a generic test strategy could guide teams through an adequate definition of test scenarios.