Related papers: SocNavBench: A Grounded Simulation Testing Framewo…
Embodied navigation that adheres to social norms remains an open research challenge. Our SocialNav is a foundational model for socially-aware navigation with a hierarchical "brain-action" architecture, capable of understanding high-level…
Mobile robots are increasingly populating homes, hospitals, shopping malls, factory floors, and other human environments. Human society has social norms that people mutually accept; obeying these norms is an essential signal that someone is…
Social robot navigation is an evolving research field that aims to find efficient strategies to safely navigate dynamic environments populated by humans. A critical challenge in this domain is the accurate modeling of human motion, which…
The future robots are expected to work in a shared physical space with humans [1], however, the presence of humans leads to a dynamic environment that is challenging for mobile robots to navigate. The path planning algorithms designed to…
This paper proposes a Social Reward Sources (SRS) design for a Human-Robot Collaborative Navigation (HRCN) task: human-robot collaborative search. It is a flexible approach capable of handling the collaborative task, human-robot interaction…
Sociability is essential for modern robots to increase their acceptability in human environments. Traditional techniques use manually engineered utility functions inspired by observing pedestrian behaviors to achieve social navigation.…
Empowering robots to navigate in a socially compliant manner is essential for the acceptance of robots moving in human-inhabited environments. Previously, roboticists have developed geometric navigation systems with decades of empirical…
This paper presents a joint effort towards the development of a data-driven Social Robot Navigation metric to facilitate benchmarking and policy optimization for ground robots. We compiled a dataset with 4427 trajectories -- 182 real and…
This work presents the Human Navigation Simulator (HuNavSim), a novel open-source tool for the simulation of different human-agent navigation behaviors in scenarios with mobile robots. The tool, the first programmed under the ROS 2…
Understanding human perceptions of robot performance is crucial for designing socially intelligent robots that can adapt to human expectations. Current approaches often rely on surveys, which can disrupt ongoing human-robot interactions. As…
Traditional path-planning techniques treat humans as obstacles. This has changed since robots started to enter human environments. On modern robots, social navigation has become an important aspect of navigation systems. To use…
Towards human-robot coexistence, socially aware navigation is significant for mobile robots. Yet existing studies on this area focus mainly on path efficiency and pedestrian collision avoidance, which are essential but represent only a…
Autonomous navigation is a key skill for assistive and service robots. To be successful, robots have to minimise the disruption caused to humans while moving. This implies predicting how people will move and complying with social…
Robot navigation in dynamic, human-centered environments requires socially-compliant decisions grounded in robust scene understanding. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit promising capabilities such as object recognition,…
Humanoid robots hold great promise in assisting humans in diverse environments and tasks, due to their flexibility and adaptability leveraging human-like morphology. However, research in humanoid robots is often bottlenecked by the costly…
Social navigation in densely populated dynamic environments poses a significant challenge for autonomous mobile robots, requiring advanced strategies for safe interaction. Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based methods require over…
Mobile robots are increasingly deployed in cluttered environments with movable objects, posing challenges for traditional methods that prohibit interaction. In such settings, the mobile robot must go beyond traditional obstacle avoidance,…
Establishing standardized metrics for Social Robot Navigation (SRN) algorithms for assessing the quality and social compliance of robot behavior around humans is essential for SRN research. Currently, commonly used evaluation metrics lack…
Social navigation is the capability of an autonomous agent, such as a robot, to navigate in a 'socially compliant' manner in the presence of other intelligent agents such as humans. With the emergence of autonomously navigating mobile…
Socially compliant navigation requires robots to move safely and appropriately in human-centered environments by respecting social norms. However, social norms are often ambiguous, and in a single scenario, multiple actions may be equally…