# SidewalkBench: A benchmark for visual navigation on urban sidewalks

- Source: arXiv cs.RO
- Published: 2026-10-19T04:00:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/u0xzonijz2hky2xy47hcxkhpi
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16953

## Summary

SidewalkBench is a benchmark for visual navigation on urban sidewalks built on NVIDIA Isaac Sim. It provides GPU-accelerated, high-fidelity sidewalk environments, including procedurally generated and real-world scanned scenes, and adds event-driven pedestrian reactive behaviors. The authors evaluated 9 visual navigation models on 330 unit-test scenarios, 800 pedestrian-reactive scenarios, and 105 long-horizon scenarios. They found that pedestrian interaction and long-horizon robustness remain key bottlenecks for existing models, and that scaling up sidewalk training with synthetic data is a viable direction.
