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research article

Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social RobotNavigation Algorithms

Francis, Anthony
•
Perez-D'Arpino, Claudia
•
Li, Chengshu
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June 1, 2025
ACM Transactions On Human-robot Interaction

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 because it involves not just robotic agents moving in static environments but also dynamic human agents and their perceptions of the appropriateness of robot behavior. In contrast, clear, repeatable, and accessible benchmarks have accelerated progress in fields like computer vision, natural language processing and traditional robot navigation by enabling researchers to fairly compare algorithms, revealing limitations of existing solutions and illuminating promising new directions. We believe the same approach can benefit social navigation. In this article, we pave the road toward common, widely accessible, and repeatable benchmarking criteria to evaluate social robot navigation. Our contributions include (a) a definition of a socially navigating robot as one that respects the principles of safety, comfort, legibility, politeness, social competency, agent understanding, proactivity, and responsiveness to context, (b) guidelines for the use of metrics, development of scenarios, benchmarks, datasets, and simulators to evaluate social navigation, and (c) a design of a social navigation metrics framework to make it easier to compare results from different simulators, robots, and datasets.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.1145/3700599
Web of Science ID

WOS:001460064300003

Author(s)
Francis, Anthony

Logical Robot

Perez-D'Arpino, Claudia

Nvidia Corporation

Li, Chengshu

Stanford University

Xia, Fei

Alphabet Inc.

Alahi, Alexandre  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Alami, Rachid

Universite de Toulouse

Bera, Aniket

Purdue University System

Biswas, Abhijat

Carnegie Mellon University

Biswas, Joydeep

University of Texas System

Chandra, Rohan

University of Virginia

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Date Issued

2025-06-01

Publisher

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY

Published in
ACM Transactions On Human-robot Interaction
Volume

14

Issue

2

Article Number

34

Subjects

social robotics

•

robot navigation

•

datasets

•

benchmarks

•

simulators

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
VITA  
Available on Infoscience
April 16, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/249289
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