Robots navigating through uncontrolled human spaces face many challenges due to the uncertainty of human behavior and the unstructured nature of environmental context and social rules. Social robot navigation combines planning with human-robot interaction and communication strategies to provide acceptable, context-dependent robot behavior.

With recent rapid transformations in AI, social robot navigation is changing, and the proposed Advances in Social Robot Navigation workshop explores these innovations in areas including planning, human-robot interaction, and beyond. This proposed, full-day workshop brings together experts in these fields for invited talks, panel discussions, and participant presentations on advances in social robot navigation. The proposed workshop will also host the Arena 4.0 challenge on benchmarking social robot navigation strategies through a set of AI-enabled open-source tools.

Building on our successful series of workshops at ICRA'22, IROS'23, and RSS'24, this proposed workshop aims to investigate key aspects that make robot navigation more acceptable, legible, and social. This includes motion-task planning techniques, foundation models, human robot interaction, communication strategies, and human understanding ranging from individual behavior to pedestrian and crowd dynamics. We invite researchers from these fields to submit short papers and participate in our benchmark challenge, and to join us for a workshop designed to encourage discussion.