Through the USARSim and MOAST open source projects, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is promoting performance evaluation and benchmarking for robot systems and facilitating innovations in robotics. These tools and the open source approach have greatly enhanced and streamlined the robotics development process as evidenced by over 50,000 downloads, collaboration among fifteen developers and over 100 users, and two major international robotics competitions based upon the software.
For promoting performance evaluation and benchmarking for robot systems and facilitating innovations in robotics