Chapter 4: Evaluation

Core Questions

• How do we measure success in open-ended robotic tasks?
• What metrics capture both capability and safety?
• How do we validate models before real-world deployment?

Topics

4.1 Success Metrics

• Task completion rates
• Efficiency and execution time
• Graceful degradation under failure
• Multi-dimensional performance trade-offs

4.2 Safety and Robustness

• Out-of-distribution detection
• Adversarial robustness testing
• Failure mode analysis
• Safety-critical validation frameworks

4.3 Benchmarking Protocols

• Standardized evaluation suites
• Sim-to-real gap measurement
• Cross-platform reproducibility
• The generalization challenge

4.4 Human Evaluation

• User studies and preference metrics
• Expert vs. novice assessments
• Long-term deployment studies
• Ethical considerations in evaluation