SocNavBench: A Grounded Simulation Testing Framework for Evaluating Social Navigation

Understand

The human-robot interaction (HRI) community has developed many methods for robots to navigate safely and socially alongside humans.

• However, experimental procedures to evaluate these works are usually constructed on a per-method basis.
• Such disparate evaluations make it difficult to compare the performance of such methods across the literature.
• To bridge this gap, we introduce SocNavBench, a simulation framework for evaluating social navigation algorithms.