Related papers: SACSoN: Scalable Autonomous Control for Social Nav…
Humans are well-adept at navigating public spaces shared with others, where current autonomous mobile robots still struggle: while safely and efficiently reaching their goals, humans communicate their intentions and conform to unwritten…
Adapting to social conventions is an unavoidable requirement for the acceptance of assistive and social robots. While the scientific community broadly accepts that assistive robots and social robot companions are unlikely to have widespread…
In this paper, we consider the problem of designing collision-free, dynamically feasible, and socially-aware trajectories for robots operating in environments populated by humans. We define trajectories to be social-aware if they do not…
When humans move in a shared space, they choose navigation strategies that preserve their mutual safety. At the same time, each human seeks to minimise the number of modifications to her/his path. In order to achieve this result, humans use…
Social navigation datasets are necessary to assess social navigation algorithms and train machine learning algorithms. Most of the currently available datasets target pedestrians' movements as a pattern to be replicated by robots. It can be…
Mobile robot navigation in dynamic human environments requires policies that balance adaptability to diverse behaviors with compliance to safety constraints. We hypothesize that integrating data-driven rewards with rule-based objectives…
To navigate safely and efficiently in crowded spaces, robots should not only perceive the current state of the environment but also anticipate future human movements. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning architecture, namely…
Imitation learning holds the promise to address challenging robotic tasks such as autonomous navigation. It however requires a human supervisor to oversee the training process and send correct control commands to robots without feedback,…
Real world visual navigation requires robots to operate in unfamiliar, human-occupied dynamic environments. Navigation around humans is especially difficult because it requires anticipating their future motion, which can be quite…
As robots across domains start collaborating with humans in shared environments, algorithms that enable them to reason over human intent are important to achieve safe interplay. In our work, we study human intent through the problem of…
The success of collaboration between humans and robots in shared environments relies on the robot's real-time adaptation to human motion. Specifically, in Social Navigation, the agent should be close enough to assist but ready to back up to…
A major challenge to deploying robots widely is navigation in human-populated environments, commonly referred to as social robot navigation. While the field of social navigation has advanced tremendously in recent years, the fair evaluation…
A major goal in robotics is to enable intelligent mobile robots to operate smoothly in shared human-robot environments. One of the most fundamental capabilities in service of this goal is competent navigation in this ``social" context. As a…
Social navigation has been gaining attentions with the growth in machine intelligence. Since reinforcement learning can select an action in the prediction phase at a low computational cost, it has been formulated in a social navigation…
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…
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…
Mobile robots are being used on a large scale in various crowded situations and become part of our society. The socially acceptable navigation behavior of a mobile robot with individual human consideration is an essential requirement for…
A driving algorithm that aligns with good human driving practices, or at the very least collaborates effectively with human drivers, is crucial for developing safe and efficient autonomous vehicles. In practice, two main approaches are…
This paper presents the framework for a novel Unified Socially-Aware Navigation (USAN) architecture and explains its need in Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) applications. Our approach emphasizes interpersonal distance and how spatial…
Navigating fluently around pedestrians is a necessary capability for mobile robots deployed in human environments, such as buildings and homes. While research on social navigation has focused mainly on the scalability with the number of…