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

Abstract: This work presents the Human Navigation Simulator (HuNavSim), 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 employed along with different well-known robotics simulators like Gazebo. The main goal is to ease the development and evaluation of human-aware robot navigation systems in simulation. Besides a general human-navigation model, HuNavSim includes, as a novelty, a rich set of individual and realistic human navigation behaviors and a complete set of metrics for social navigation benchmarking.