Related papers: The BARN Challenge 2023 -- Autonomous Navigation i…
Autonomous robots collaboratively exploring an unknown environment is still an open problem. The problem has its roots in coordination among non-stationary agents, each with only a partial view of information. The problem is compounded when…
High-speed cruising scenarios with mixed traffic greatly challenge the road safety of autonomous vehicles (AVs). Unlike existing works that only look at fundamental modules in isolation, this work enhances AV safety in mixed-traffic…
Reliable navigation in unstructured, real-world environments remains a significant challenge for embodied agents, especially when operating across diverse terrains, weather conditions, and sensor configurations. In this paper, we introduce…
This paper introduces SANGO (Socially Aware Navigation through Grouped Obstacles), a novel method that ensures socially appropriate behavior by dynamically grouping obstacles and adhering to social norms. Using deep reinforcement learning,…
We propose a novel benchmark environment for Safe Reinforcement Learning focusing on aquatic navigation. Aquatic navigation is an extremely challenging task due to the non-stationary environment and the uncertainties of the robotic…
As the demand for mobile robots continues to increase, social navigation has emerged as a critical task, driving active research into deep reinforcement learning (RL) approaches. However, because pedestrian dynamics and social conventions…
Sampling-based methods such as Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRTs) have been widely used for generating motion paths for autonomous mobile systems. In this work, we extend time-based RRTs with Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) to generate,…
We propose a method to tackle the problem of mapless collision-avoidance navigation where humans are present using 2D laser scans. Our proposed method uses ego-safety to measure collision from the robot's perspective while social-safety to…
Balancing safety and efficiency when planning in crowded scenarios with uncertain dynamics is challenging where it is imperative to accomplish the robot's mission without incurring any safety violations. Typically, chance constraints are…
The integration of autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) in industrial environments, particularly warehouses, has revolutionized logistics and operational efficiency. However, ensuring the safety of human workers in dynamic, shared spaces remains…
This paper focuses on real-time occupancy mapping and collision checking onboard an autonomous robot navigating in an unknown environment. We propose a new map representation, in which occupied and free space are separated by the decision…
Autonomous navigation in unknown environments requires multi-scale spatial understanding that captures geometric details, topological connectivity, and global structure to support high-level decision making under partial observability.…
When deploying Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents into a physical system, we must ensure that these agents are well aware of the underlying constraints. In many real-world problems, however, the constraints are often hard to specify…
This study presents a benchmark for evaluating action-constrained reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. In action-constrained RL, each action taken by the learning system must comply with certain constraints. These constraints are crucial…
Reinforcement learning can enable robots to navigate to distant goals while optimizing user-specified reward functions, including preferences for following lanes, staying on paved paths, or avoiding freshly mowed grass. However, online…
A safe and robust on-road navigation system is a crucial component of achieving fully automated vehicles. NVIDIA recently proposed an End-to-End algorithm that can directly learn steering commands from raw pixels of a front camera by using…
When robots handle navigation tasks while avoiding collisions, they perform in crowded and complex environments not as good as in stable and homogeneous environments. This often results in a low success rate and poor efficiency. Therefore,…
We consider the problem of safe real-time navigation of a robot in a dynamic environment with moving obstacles of arbitrary smooth geometries and input saturation constraints. We assume that the robot detects and models nearby obstacle…
This work presents an approach to learn path planning for robot social navigation by demonstration. We make use of Fully Convolutional Neural Networks (FCNs) to learn from expert's path demonstrations a map that marks a feasible path to the…
Classical navigation systems typically operate using a fixed set of hand-picked parameters (e.g. maximum speed, sampling rate, inflation radius, etc.) and require heavy expert re-tuning in order to work in new environments. To mitigate this…