HuNavSim: A ROS 2 Human Navigation Simulator for Benchmarking Human-Aware Robot Navigation

Abstract

This work presents the Human Navigation Simulator ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">HuNavSim</i> ), a novel open-source tool for the simulation of different human-agent navigation behaviors in scenarios with mobile robots. The tool, the first programmed under the ROS 2 framework, can be used together with different well-known robotics simulators like Gazebo. The main goal is to facilitate the development and evaluation of human-aware robot navigation systems in simulation. In addition to a general human-navigation model, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">HuNavSim</i> includes, as a novelty, a rich set of individual and varied human navigation behaviors and an comprehensive set of metrics for social navigation benchmarking.