ROSNavBench: An Automated Benchmarking Framework for Systematic Planner–Controller Selection in Mobile Robotics

Abstract

Autonomous mobile robots need reliable path planning and local execution. Plenty of tools exist to evaluate either global planners or controllers. The open-source automated frameworks built for Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) do not measure computational cost alongside navigational reliability or report the statistics for multi-criteria decision making. The choice falls back on manual comparison, and that becomes harder as the environment changes. ROSNavBench is an open-source framework that automates this evaluation for global planners and controllers in ROS 2. It scores efficiency, reliability, and adaptability over a range of scenarios, and thus a user can pick the planner and controller that fit the job. Runs are automated and repeated, which tightens the statistics and takes the manual work out of the loop. We tested the framework across simulations and hardware. Navigation times in the two domains correlate at r=0.97, but a gap remains, and its width shifts from one trial to the next.