BARN Challenge 2023 – Navigation in Tighly Constrained Spaces

Competition Abstract:
Designing autonomous robot navigation systems has been a topic of interest to the robotics community for decades. Indeed, many existing navigation systems allow robots to move from one point to another in a collision-free manner, which may create the impression that navigation is a solved problem. However, autonomous mobile robots still struggle in many scenarios, e.g., colliding with or getting stuck in novel and tightly constrained spaces. These troublesome scenarios have many real-world implications, such as poor navigation performance in adversarial search and rescue environments, in naturally cluttered daily households, and in congested social spaces such as classrooms, offices, and cafeterias. Meeting these real-world challenges requires systems that can both successfully and efficiently navigate the environment with confidence, posing fundamental challenges to current autonomous systems, from perception to control. Therefore, the Benchmark Autonomous Robot Navigation (BARN) Challenge aims at creating a benchmark for state-of-the-art navigation systems and pushing the boundaries of their performance in these challenging and highly constrained environments.

* Held during ICRA 2023, the largest robotics conference in the world. We were ranked 2nd among 6 teams in the real-world stage.