Towards Data-Driven Metrics for Social Robot Navigation Benchmarking

Abstract

This paper presents a joint effort towards the development of a data-driven Social Robot Navigation metric to facilitate benchmarking and policy optimization for ground robots. We compiled a dataset with 4427 trajectories -- 182 real and 4245 simulated -- and presented it to human raters, yielding a total of 4402 rated trajectories after data quality assurance. Notably, we provide the first all-encompassing learned social robot navigation metric, along qualitative and quantitative results, including the test loss achieved, a comparison against hand-crafted metrics, and an ablation study. All data, software, and model weights are publicly available.