2025/10/03 by Stefano Trepella, Trepella, Stefano, Mauro Martini +12
Computer Science · Engineering · Psychology · #Evacuation and Crowd Dynamics #Human-Automation Interaction and Safety #Social Robot Interaction and HRI #cs.RO
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2510.02941
Presented at IEEE RO-MAN 2026 conference
arxiv created 2026/07/30 · arxiv updated 2026/07/31
Social, also called human-aware, navigation is a key challenge for integrating mobile robots into human environments. The evaluation of such systems is complex, as factors such as comfort, safety, and legibility must be considered. Human-centered assessments, typically conducted through surveys, provide reliable insights but are costly, resource-intensive, and difficult to reproduce or compare across systems. Alternatively, numerical social navigation metrics are easy to compute and facilitate comparisons, yet the community lacks consensus on a standard set of metrics. This work explores the relationship between numerical metrics and human-centered evaluations to identify potential correlations. If specific quantitative measures align with human perceptions, they could serve as preliminary benchmarking tools, providing a human-aligned assessment when large-scale surveys are not feasible. Our results indicate that while current metrics capture some aspects of robot navigation behavior, important subjective factors remain insufficiently represented, necessitating new metrics.