ACME: A Multi-Cultural, Multi-Embodiment Social-Navigation Dataset

Shashank Rao Marpally, Allan Wang, Atharva Ghotavadekar, Renato Alexandre Ribeiro, Nhat Le, Pilar Bachiller-Burgos, Pranav Goyal, Subham Agrawal, Yasuhiro Nitta, Howard Ziyu Han, Daeun Song, Masaki Kuribayashi, Kohei Uehara, Xiyue Wang, Yangzhe Kong, Duc M. Nguyen, Amirreza Payandeh, Gerardo Pérez-González, Alejandro Torrejón-Harto, Jeeho Ahn, Tisha Jain, Andrew Stratton, Elvin Yang, Jorge de Heuvel, Nico Ostermann-Myrau, Sai Anudeep Sajja, Mithilya Raj, Daisuke Sato, Gaston Rouquette, Nikolas Martelaro, Maki Sugimoto, Hironobu Takagi, Chieko Asakawa, Maren Bennewitz, Aaron Steinfeld, Xuesu Xiao, Christoforos Mavrogiannis, Harold Soh

Understanding how robots and humans move in shared spaces is essential for designing effective social robot navigation policies and predicting human behavior. However, existing datasets often lack the diversity needed to capture differences in culture, geography, and human-robot interaction-factors that strongly shape appropriate social behavior. To address this gap, we introduce ACME: A Cross-cultural, Multi-Embodiment dataset for social navigation. A large-scale data collection effort across 8 sites in 5 countries, using 7 robot embodiments, ACME is a large and diverse multi-modal dataset aimed at advancing social navigation research, providing 29.35 hours of onboard robot data and 43.5 hours of overhead pedestrian tracking data. Unlike prior datasets, it focuses on capturing goal-driven social navigation behavior in complex social scenarios with explicit robot-crowd interaction through robot speech. To facilitate learning navigation policies and predicting pedestrian trajectories, ACME provides 3D and 2D scene features, odometry, interaction information, and human-annotated pedestrian trajectory labels. We make ACME easy to use by providing both human-readable data for each sensor modality as well as raw binary data. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses show that our dataset captures more challenging scenarios and a broader distribution of pedestrian behavior than previous datasets.