Towards Data-Driven Metrics for Social Robot Navigation Benchmarking (2509.01251v1)

Abstract: This paper presents a joint effort towards the development of a data-driven Social Robot Navigation metric to facilitate benchmarking and policy optimization. We provide our motivations for our approach and describe our proposal for storing rated social navigation trajectory datasets. Following these guidelines, 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. We also trained an RNN-based baseline metric on the dataset and present quantitative and qualitative results. All data, software, and model weights are publicly available.