  The 3rd BARN (Benchmark Autonomous Robot Navigation) Challenge took place at
the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024)
in Yokohama, Japan and continued to evaluate the performance of
state-of-the-art autonomous ground navigation systems in highly constrained
environments. Similar to the trend in The 1st and 2nd BARN Challenge at ICRA
2022 and 2023 in Philadelphia (North America) and London (Europe), The 3rd BARN
Challenge in Yokohama (Asia) became more regional, i.e., mostly Asian teams
participated. The size of the competition has slightly shrunk (six simulation
teams, four of which were invited to the physical competition). The competition
results, compared to last two years, suggest that the field has adopted new
machine learning approaches while at the same time slightly converged to a few
common practices. However, the regional nature of the physical participants
suggests a challenge to promote wider participation all over the world and
provide more resources to travel to the venue. In this article, we discuss the
challenge, the approaches used by the three winning teams, and lessons learned
to direct future research and competitions.
