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

Abstract--Following up on our previous works, in this paper, we present Arena-Rosnav 2.0 an extension to our previous works Arena-Bench [1] and Arena-Rosnav [2], 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 Figure 1: Arena-Rosnav 2.0 provides tools to develop, train, and research endeavors. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of benchmark DRL approaches against state-of the art navigation our system by integrating two new simulators and a variety planners in highly dynamic and crowded environments. In contrast of state of the art navigation approaches and benchmark to the previous version, the structure of this version is completely them against one another. The platform is openly available at modular with each entity being independently deployable within its https://github.com/Arena-Rosnav.