# SEAN: Social Environment for Autonomous Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.04300 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.04300/

## Key facts

- Cited by 18 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Socially Compliant Navigation Dataset (SCAND): A Large-Scale Dataset of Demonstrations for Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15041/) (2022)
- [Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Robot Navigation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16740/) (2023)
- [Social Coordination and Altruism in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00200/) (2021)
- [A Survey on Human-aware Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11650/) (2021)
- [Conflict Avoidance in Social Navigation -- a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12113/) (2021)
- [Virtual Community: An Open World for Humans, Robots, and Society](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14893/) (2025)
- [NavDreams: Towards Camera-Only RL Navigation Among Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12299/) (2022)
- [TBD Pedestrian Data Collection: Towards Rich, Portable, and Large-Scale Natural Pedestrian Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17187/) (2023)
- [Arena 4.0: A Comprehensive ROS2 Development and Benchmarking Platform for Human-centric Navigation Using Generative-Model-based Environment Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12471/) (2024)
- [SVLTA: Benchmarking Vision-Language Temporal Alignment via Synthetic Video Situation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.05925/) (2025)
- [Ella: Embodied Social Agents with Lifelong Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.24019/) (2025)
- [Learning Social Navigation from Demonstrations with Conditional Neural Processes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03582/) (2022)
- [Arena-Rosnav 2.0: A Development and Benchmarking Platform for Robot Navigation in Highly Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.10023/) (2023)
- [A Framework for Realistic Simulation of Daily Human Activity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15400/) (2023)
- [Visually-grounded Humanoid Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08509/) (2026)
- [Arena-Web -- A Web-based Development and Benchmarking Platform for Autonomous Navigation Approaches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02898/) (2023)
- [Towards Rich, Portable, and Large-Scale Pedestrian Data Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01974/) (2022)
- [Do World Models Make Better Robots? A Survey of Evaluation Benchmarks for Predictive Embodied Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29669/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social navigation research is performed on a variety of robotic platforms, scenarios, and environments. Making comparisons between navigation algorithms is challenging because of the effort involved in building these systems and the diversity of platforms used by the community; nonetheless, evaluation is critical to understanding progress in the field. In a step towards reproducible evaluation of social navigation algorithms, we propose the Social Environment for Autonomous Navigation (SEAN). SEAN is a high visual fidelity, open source, and extensible social navigation simulation platform which includes a toolkit for evaluation of navigation algorithms. We demonstrate SEAN and its evaluation toolkit in two environments with dynamic pedestrians and using two different robots.