NewPEDS accepted to IEEE RA-L 2026

Social navigation,
from first world
to final benchmark.

Arena-Rosnav is an open-source ROS 2 platform to generate human-centric worlds, simulate crowds, train planners and benchmark them, from fast 2D Flatland to photorealistic Isaac Sim.

Isaac Sim, hospital world, PEDS pedestrians

4simulators
10+navigation planners
10+robot models
6pedestrian drivers
5task modes

The platform

The whole research loop in one stack.

Modules are abstracted across simulators, so a scenario you design once can run in 2D for training and in photorealistic 3D for evaluation.

Robot in a generated hospital corridor
01

Generate worlds

Language and diffusion models turn a text prompt or a 2D floorplan into a furnished, human-centric 3D world, drawing on a semantically annotated model database.

02

Simulate people

Swap between six pedestrian drivers, from social force to learned models, with groups, queues and need-driven behavior trees.

03

Train planners

Train DRL agents with Stable-Baselines3 from a single config file, with multiprocessed rollouts, curricula and faster-than-real-time 2D simulation.

Benchmark plots across planners
04

Benchmark

One click runs planners across worlds and scenarios and records collisions, path length and time to goal, plus social metrics such as time in personal space.

Simulators

One scenario. Four simulators.

Pick the simulator for the job and keep the same worlds, robots, pedestrians and task modes.

Isaac SimPhotorealistic RTX rendering and efficient training
UnityReal-time photorealism and detailed pedestrian animation
GazeboFast 3D physics, jointed robots, LIDAR and RGBD plugins
Flatland2D, faster than real time, built for DRL training

Benchmark

Put your planner up against the field.

Classic, learned and socially aware planners ship ready to run, on robots from small differential drives to quadrupeds.

TurtleBot3 Waffle Pi
TurtleBot3 Burger
Jackal
Ridgeback
Dingo
TIAGo
Robotino
youBot
Care-O-bot 4

Papers

The research behind it.

  1. 2025

    RSS 2025

    Demonstrating Arena 5.0: A Photorealistic ROS2 Simulation Framework for Developing and Benchmarking Social Navigation

    Complete NVIDIA Isaac Gym integration, a benchmark of state-of-the-art social navigation planners, and scenario generation for emergency and rescue situations.

  2. 2024

    arXiv 2024

    Arena 4.0: A Comprehensive ROS2 Development and Benchmarking Platform for Human-centric Navigation Using Generative-Model-based Environment Generation

    Worlds generated from text prompts or floorplans with LLMs and diffusion models, a semantic 3D model database, and the move to ROS 2.

  3. 2024

    RSS 2024

    Arena 3.0: Advancing Social Navigation in Collaborative and Highly Dynamic Environments

    New social force models and human-robot interaction patterns, new task modes, and one abstraction over Flatland, Gazebo and Unity.