  The evaluation of robot capabilities to navigate human crowds is essential to
conceive new robots intended to operate in public spaces. This paper initiates
the development of a benchmark tool to evaluate such capabilities; our long
term vision is to provide the community with a simulation tool that generates
virtual crowded environment to test robots, to establish standard scenarios and
metrics to evaluate navigation techniques in terms of safety and efficiency,
and thus, to install new methods to benchmarking robots' crowd navigation
capabilities. This paper presents the architecture of the simulation tools,
introduces first scenarios and evaluation metrics, as well as early results to
demonstrate that our solution is relevant to be used as a benchmark tool.
