“A major challenge to deploying robots widely is navigation in human-populated environments, commonly referred to as social robot navigation. While the field of social navigation has advanced tremendously in recent years, the fair evaluation of algorithms that tackle social navigation remains hard. … In contrast, clear, repeatable, and accessible benchmarks have accelerated progress in fields like computer vision, natural language processing and traditional robot navigation. … In this paper, we pave the road towards common, widely accessible, and repeatable benchmarking criteria to evaluate social robot navigation.”

Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.