  The 2nd BARN (Benchmark Autonomous Robot Navigation) Challenge took place at
the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2023)
in London, UK and continued to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art
autonomous ground navigation systems in highly constrained environments.
Compared to The 1st BARN Challenge at ICRA 2022 in Philadelphia, the
competition has grown significantly in size, doubling the numbers of
participants in both the simulation qualifier and physical finals: Ten teams
from all over the world participated in the qualifying simulation competition,
six of which were invited to compete with each other in three physical obstacle
courses at the conference center in London, and three teams won the challenge
by navigating a Clearpath Jackal robot from a predefined start to a goal with
the shortest amount of time without colliding with any obstacle. The
competition results, compared to last year, suggest that the teams are making
progress toward more robust and efficient ground navigation systems that work
out-of-the-box in many obstacle environments. However, a significant amount of
fine-tuning is still needed onsite to cater to different difficult navigation
scenarios. Furthermore, challenges still remain for many teams when facing
extremely cluttered obstacles and increasing navigation speed. In this article,
we discuss the challenge, the approaches used by the three winning teams, and
lessons learned to direct future research.

Robotics