With robots beginning to share spaces with humans in uncontrolled environments, social robot navigation is an increasingly relevant area of robotics research. We propose to bring together experts and community members to discuss advances in social navigation and opportunities to unify efforts around evaluation methods. The day-long event will feature invited expert speakers, poster presentations, and a moderated community discussion. We will also host a hands-on session on the new open-source platform SEANavBench. SEANavBench enables training and evaluating social navigation systems in a high visual fidelity environment and provides evaluation measures for social navigation systems to quantify safety versus efficiency tradeoffs.

Our workshop will take place in a hybrid format. We will do our best to accomodate both physical and virtual contribution and participation. For virtual participants, if you have registered for the conference, please visit this link to access our workshop remotely: https://events.infovaya.com/session?id=14404

This work was funded by an Amazon Research Award (Vazquez, 2020) and grants (IIS-1734361, IIS-1900821, IIS-1943072, IIS-1924802) from the National Science Foundation. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Amazon or the National Science Foundation.