Scoring robotic competitions: Balancing judging promptness and meaningful performance evaluation

To have a significant and fair competition an adequate scoring system is necessary. Different scoring systems exist, each one directly related to the nature and goals of the competition, e.g. student/educational, focused on benchmarking, Grand Challenge style, etc. However, the design of such systems is not an easy task. It is mandatory to design approaches which enable the judges to score teams in a reasonable time after the end of their performance. Scoring systems cannot be therefore extremely complex. On the other hand, it is crucial to have a judging system for teams which provides a meaningful and fair performance evaluation of what the teams achieved in the field. In this paper, several approaches to scoring are presented and compared. Our focus is on search and rescue competitions. Each approach is critically analysed and its features comparatively discussed. This analysis is beneficial to provide an overview of scoring systems tailored to different kinds of competitions. The reported examples can be used as building blocks to improve existing scoring systems or to design new approaches.