On the October 15th EUROBENCH, represented by the University of Heidelberg and the CSIC, hosted a workshop organized by Katja Mombaur (Heidelberg University), Felix Aller (Heidelberg University) and Diego Torricelli (CSIC) at the Humanoids 2019 Conference of the IEEE.
This workshop was created with the aim of getting contribution of external parties and creating a common an open debate about the meaning of benchmarking and how permormance indicators might be stablished in order to be relevant.
The workshop had several relevant contributions such as the representatives of some of the projects that are being carried out under the First EUROBENCH FSTP, where they had the chance to present their projects and explain the impact of the developments they are carrying out and how are they facing the challenges of benchmarking on the development of bipedal locomotion technologies. Here we had, for example, Davide Giusino from the University of Bologna, who is member of the STEPbySTEP Project, which is working on improving the understanding of the user’s experience in the benchmarking of weareble robotic systems for bipedal locomotion as a consequence of doing this on the basis on technical performance indicators or effects on the user’s motor functions.
We could also hear the experiences and advances made by professionasls sucha as Vittorio Lippi, from the Technische Universität Berlin, who talked about the technical implementation of a testbed to perform state of the art posture control and balance experiments and provides versatile tools for the design of new experiments. This benchmarking is based on measured variables representing body kinematics performed under perturbed conditions. The system he proposed is inspired by the experience with human posture control experiments oriented to to characterize and quantify the balancing behavior across subjects of different body size and weight, and to relate balancing problems to insufficiencies in sensors, actuators, or specific disturbances. On this basis it aims to provide quantitative measures of the performance.