News & Announcements
Stay up to date with ARENA Lab's latest publications, releases, and opportunities.
PEDS accepted at IEEE RA-L, to be presented at ICRA 2027!
"PEDS: Closed-Loop Benchmarking of Social Navigation across Pedestrian Behavior Models" by Duc Tai Nguyen, Volodymyr Shcherbyna, Anh Do Duc, Zhengcheng Shen and Linh Kästner has been accepted at IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and will be presented at ICRA 2027 in Seoul. PEDS treats the pedestrian behavior model as a controlled variable in social navigation benchmarks, with six pedestrian drivers, a closed-loop dataset and Isaac Sim scenarios. Congratulations to Tai and the team!
Learn More →Paper accepted at NeurIPS 2026!
"Change-Robust Online Topological Memory for Long-Term Relocalization and Semantic Navigation" by Jiaming Wang, Jizhuo Chen, Diwen Liu, Atharva Ghotavadekar, Jiaxuan Da, Linh Kästner and Harold Soh has been accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Congratulations to Jiaming and the whole team!
Learn More →ARENA Lab at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh
The lab presented two papers at IEEE/RSJ IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh: D3D-GEN, robot-aware domain-grounded 3D world generation for social robotics (Duc Anh Do and team), and GROVE, grounded pedestrian simulation via natural language for interactive social robot navigation (Duc Tai Nguyen and team). Linh co-organized the 5th Workshop on Social Robot Navigation on September 27, 2026. Thanks to everyone who visited our talks and the workshop.
Learn More →3 papers accepted at IROS 2026!
Three papers from ARENA Lab have been accepted at IEEE/RSJ IROS 2026. Huge congratulations to all authors — see you in the venue!
Linh leading organizing team for IROS 2026 Social Navigation Workshop
Linh Kästner is leading the organizing committee for the Social Navigation Workshop at IROS 2026. The workshop will bring together researchers working on socially-aware robot navigation.
Learn More →Welcome Diego Diaz — incoming PhD student (2027)
Diego Diaz will be joining ARENA Lab as an incoming PhD student starting 2027. Diego has already contributed as a co-author on Arena-Rosnav 3.0 and 4.0.
Henry Shen confirmed as full-time Postdoc
Zhengcheng "Henry" Shen officially joins ARENA Lab as a full-time Postdoctoral Researcher alongside Vova. Welcome aboard, Henry!
Thanh Levi Toan promoted to PhD student
Thanh Levi Toan (Levi) is promoted from Research Assistant to PhD student at ARENA Lab. Congrats, Levi!
Papers accepted at ICRA 2026!
Multiple papers from ARENA Lab accepted at IEEE ICRA 2026. Congratulations to all authors!
Zhengcheng Shen promoted to Postdoc
Congratulations to Zhengcheng Shen on completing his PhD and joining ARENA Lab as a Postdoctoral Researcher!
ARENA Lab actively recruiting for Fall 2026
We are hiring fully-funded PhD students, postdocs, and research assistants for Fall 2026. Apply now!
Learn More →ARENA Lab is established – hiring fully-funded students!
ARENA Lab is officially established at Singapore Management University. We are hiring fully-funded PhD students, postdocs, and research assistants!
Learn More →1 paper accepted at IROS 2025! Congrats to Vova and team!
Our paper "Arena-Bench 2.0" has been accepted at IROS 2025 in Hangzhou, China.
1 paper accepted at RSS 2025!
"Arena-Rosnav 5.0: A Photorealistic ROS2 Simulation Framework" accepted at RSS 2025 in Los Angeles!
2 papers accepted to ICRA 2025 in Atlanta!
Two papers accepted at IEEE ICRA 2025. Congratulations to all authors!
Welcome Vova and Teham – new postdocs!
Volodymyr Shcherbyna and Teham Buiyan join as postdoctoral researchers!
Best Demo Award at RoboSG 2024!
ARENA Lab won the Best Demo Award for our live robot navigation demonstration!
1 paper accepted at RSS 2024!
"Arena-Rosnav 3.0" accepted at Robotics: Science and Systems 2024.
Giang and Duc Anh joined as PhD students
Huu Giang Nguyen and Duc Anh Do officially joined ARENA Lab as PhD students.
Harold receives tenure – celebration!
Congratulations to Prof. Harold Soh for receiving tenure at NUS!
ARENA Lab launched at TUB, NUS, SMU!
ARENA Lab officially launched as a cross-institutional research lab spanning TU Berlin, NUS, and SMU.