Testing Autonomous Robot Control Software using Procedural Content Generation

Abstract. We present a novel approach for reducing manual effort when testing autonomous robot control algorithms. We use procedural content generation, as developed for the film and video game industries, to create a diverse range of test situations. We execute these in the Player/Stage robot simulator and auto-matically rate them for their safety significance using an event-based scoring system. Situations exhibiting dangerous behaviour will score highly, and are thus flagged for the attention of a safety engineer. This process removes the time-consuming tasks of hand-crafting and monitoring situations while testing an autonomous robot control algorithm. We present a case study of the pro-posed approach – we generated 500 randomised situations, and our prototype tool simulated and rated them. We have analysed the three highest rated situa-tions in depth, and this analysis revealed weaknesses in the smoothed nearness-diagram control algorithm