Stepfield pallets

Abstract

Stepfield pallets are a fabricated and repeatable terrain for evaluating robot mobility. They were developed to provide emergency responders and robot developers a common mobility challenge that could be easily replicated to capture statistically significant robot performance data. Stepfield pallets have provided robot mobility challenges for the international RoboCupRescue Robot League competitions since 2005 and have proliferated widely for qualification and practice. They are currently being proposed as a standard test apparatus to evaluate robot mobility. This paper describes the origin and design of stepfield pallets, and discusses their use in several proposed standard test methods for response robots.