An Euclidean norm based criterion to assess robots’ 2D path-following performance AS2015 Special Issue articles: This issue includes a series of papers from talks, posters and collaborations resulting from and inspired by the Algebraic Statistics Conference held in Genoa, Italy, in June 2015. Special issue guest editors: Piotr Zwiernik and Fabio Rapallo. Euclidean norm Weighted matrix norm Crossing algorithm Robotics Good experimental methodologies Path-following A current need in the robotics field is the definition of methodologies for quantitatively evaluating the results of experiments. This paper contributes to this by defining a new criterion for assessing path-following tasks in the planar case, that is, evaluating the performance of robots that are required to follow a desired reference path. Such criterion comes from the study of the local differential geometry of the problem. New conditions for deciding whether or not the zero locus of a given polynomial intersects the neighbourhood of a point are defined. Based on this, new algorithms are presented and tested on both simulated data and experiments conducted at sea employing an Unmanned Surface Vehicle. Saggini, Eleonora Torrente, Maria-Laura 2016 2016-07-12 Article application/pdf islandora:1007806 http://hdl.handle.net/10560/islandora:1007806 MATH / Applied Mathematics Illinois Institute of Technology Journal of Algebraic Statistics en Open Access