Arena-Rosnav 2.0: A Development and Benchmarking Platform for Robot Navigation in Highly Dynamic Environments

TL;DR

Arena-Rosnav 2.0 is a comprehensive, restructured platform for developing and benchmarking robot navigation in dynamic environments, featuring realistic simulations, modular APIs, and extensive documentation.

Contribution

It introduces a significantly improved, unified platform with new modules, simulators, and evaluation tools for robotic navigation research.

Findings

Positive user feedback from researchers and students

Successful integration of new simulators and navigation algorithms

Demonstrated benchmarking capabilities with state-of-the-art approaches

Abstract

Following up on our previous works, in this paper, we present Arena-Rosnav 2.0 an extension to our previous works Arena-Bench and Arena-Rosnav, which adds a variety of additional modules for developing and benchmarking robotic navigation approaches. The platform is fundamentally restructured and provides unified APIs to add additional functionalities such as planning algorithms, simulators, or evaluation functionalities. We have included more realistic simulation and pedestrian behavior and provide a profound documentation to lower the entry barrier. We evaluated our system by first, conducting a user study in which we asked experienced researchers as well as new practitioners and students to test our system. The feedback was mostly positive and a high number of participants are utilizing our system for other research endeavors. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of our system by integrating two new simulators and a variety of state of the art navigation approaches and benchmark them against one another. The platform is openly available at https://github.com/Arena-Rosnav.