PERFORMANCE TESTING FOR ROBOTIC SYSTEMS

Herein, a “perception statistical performance model” (PSPM) for modelling a perception slice of a runtime stack for an autonomous vehicle or other robotic system may be used e.g. for safety/performance testing. A PSPM is configured to: receive a computed perception ground truth; determine from the perception ground truth, based on a set of learned parameters, a probabilistic perception uncertainty distribution, the parameters learned from a set of actual perception outputs generated using the perception slice to be modelled. The PSPM comprises a time-dependent model such that the perception output sampled at the current time instant depends on at least one of: an earlier one of the perception outputs sampled at a previous time instant, and an earlier one of the perception ground truths computed for a previous time instant.