Assessing Robot Navigation in Healthcare: A New Benchmarking Approach for Dynamic Environments

This work addresses the challenge of evaluating autonomous mobile robot navigation in hospitals by proposing a structured benchmarking protocol with quantitative performance metrics. Current navigation assessments in clinical environments suffer from a lack of standardization, limiting their use. We introduce a series of progressively complex tests to assess robot performance. Applied to a realistic hospital scenario, the protocol was used to evaluate two autonomous mobile robots, HOSBOT and TIAGo, yielding reliable and reproducible results. These findings support the integration of robotics into healthcare by providing a robust framework for performance assessment.