SocNavBench: A Grounded Simulation Testing Framework for Evaluating Social Navigation
This provides a standardized testing framework for researchers in human-robot interaction to compare social navigation methods, though it is incremental as it builds on existing evaluation needs.
The authors tackled the problem of inconsistent evaluation methods for social navigation algorithms in human-robot interaction by introducing SocNavBench, a simulation framework with photo-realistic scenarios and performance metrics, demonstrating its use by testing three existing methods and a baseline to reveal performance trade-offs.
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. SocNavBench comprises a simulator with photo-realistic capabilities and curated social navigation scenarios grounded in real-world pedestrian data. We also provide an implementation of a suite of metrics to quantify the performance of navigation algorithms on these scenarios. Altogether, SocNavBench provides a test framework for evaluating disparate social navigation methods in a consistent and interpretable manner. To illustrate its use, we demonstrate testing three existing social navigation methods and a baseline method on SocNavBench, showing how the suite of metrics helps infer their performance trade-offs. Our code is open-source, allowing the addition of new scenarios and metrics by the community to help evolve SocNavBench to reflect advancements in our understanding of social navigation.