RESONATE: a Real Social Navigation Testbed for Autonomous Service Robots

Abstract

Social navigation is essential for autonomous service robots operating in human environments, but progress remains constrained by the lack of extensive real-world benchmarks. This paper presents the Real Social Navigation Testbed (RESONATE), a reproducible benchmark for human-aware navigation based on a unified robotic platform, a shared ROS 2 software stack, precise trajectory ground truth, and structured social interaction scenarios. We evaluate eight controller configurations, combining classical and predictive local planners with different social modeling strategies, over eight representative scenarios with five repetitions each, yielding 320 physical experiments. The benchmark combines quantitative navigation and social metrics with participant-based qualitative assessments to jointly measure efficiency, safety, comfort, and perceived social behavior. Results reveal scenario-dependent trade-offs among the tested methods. The algorithms that stands out for their performance are the DWA with Gaussian social costmaps for its reliability, and the SFM-MPPI to provide the best balance between robustness, navigation efficiency, and social acceptance. Overall, RESONATE supports the robotics community with a real-world benchmark, reusable baselines, data, and testbed, and a consistent evaluation protocol for advancing socially aware navigation research.