IR-SIM: A Lightweight Declarative Simulator for Navigation Learning and Benchmarking

Abstract:Developing navigation policies requires simulation scenarios that support repeatable training and evaluation. Despite the availability of numerous simulators, constructing diverse navigation scenarios often involves writing simulator-specific code, using complex graphical interfaces, performing substantial manual configuration, or relying on resource-intensive computing platforms, making scenarios difficult to reproduce and reuse across experiments. To this end, we develop the Intelligent Robot Simulator (IR-SIM), a lightweight declarative simulator implemented as a Python library to support navigation learning and benchmarking through rapid construction of reusable and diverse scenarios and efficient execution on accessible platforms. IR-SIM represents scenarios as human-readable YAML configurations, in which necessary objects, behaviors, sensors, maps, and environment parameters can be flexibly specified and composed. This declarative representation makes IR-SIM friendly to large language model (LLM)-powered agents, enabling them to compose and modify executable navigation scenario files through the provided agent skills, instead of writing a large amount of code that is difficult to reuse. Despite its lightweight implementation, IR-SIM provides the essential components for navigation simulation, while retaining interfaces to high-fidelity simulators for downstream validation. Experiments demonstrate that IR-SIM runs up to several hundred times faster on the evaluated CPU platform, while agent skills reduce mean LLM-based scenario construction time by more than $50\%$ across both evaluated models. The experiments further show ability to support reproducible benchmarking and RL-based navigation policy learning.

Robotics (cs.RO); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2606.08729 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2606.08729v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.08729 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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