Related papers: Noise-enabled goal attainment in crowded collectiv…
If a robot can predict crowds in parts of its environment that are inaccessible to its sensors, then it can plan to avoid them. This paper proposes a fast, online algorithm that learns average crowd densities in different areas. It also…
An important goal for swarming research is to create methods for predicting, controlling and designing swarms, which produce collective dynamics that solve a problem through emergent and stable pattern formation, without the need for…
Robots operating in human-populated environments must navigate safely and efficiently while minimizing social disruption. Achieving this requires estimating crowd movement to avoid congested areas in real-time. Traditional microscopic…
This paper addresses navigation in crowded environments by integrating goal-conditioned generative models with Sampling-based Model Predictive Control (SMPC). We introduce goal-conditioned autoregressive models to generate crowd behaviors,…
Autonomous navigation in highly populated areas remains a challenging task for robots because of the difficulty in guaranteeing safe interactions with pedestrians in unstructured situations. In this work, we present a crowd navigation…
For robots to be a part of our daily life, they need to be able to navigate among crowds not only safely but also in a socially compliant fashion. This is a challenging problem because humans tend to navigate by implicitly cooperating with…
Crowd management is a complex, challenging and crucial task. Lack of appropriate management of crowd has, in past, led to many unfortunate stampedes with significant loss of life. To increase the crowd management efficiency, we deploy…
In densely populated environments, socially compliant navigation is critical for autonomous robots as driving close to people is unavoidable. This manner of social navigation is challenging given the constraints of human comfort and social…
Safe and efficient navigation in dynamic environments shared with humans remains an open and challenging task for mobile robots. Previous works have shown the efficacy of using reinforcement learning frameworks to train policies for…
There is a belief that complexity and chaos are essential for adaptability. But life deals with complexity every moment, without the chaos that engineers fear so, by invoking goal-directed behaviour. Goals can be programmed. That is why…
Navigation in dense crowds is a well-known open problem in robotics with many challenges in mapping, localization, and planning. Traditional solutions consider dense pedestrians as passive/active moving obstacles that are the cause of all…
We have developed an experimental setup of very simple self-propelled robots to observe collective motion emerging as a result of inelastic collisions only. A circular pool and commercial RC boats were the basis of our first setup, where we…
This work studies a robot-assisted crowd evacuation problem where we control a small group of robots to guide a large human crowd to safe locations. The challenge lies in how to model human-robot interactions and design robot controls to…
Collective decision-making is an essential capability of large-scale multi-robot systems to establish autonomy on the swarm level. A large portion of literature on collective decision-making in swarm robotics focuses on discrete decisions…
Deploying a safe mobile robot policy in scenarios with human pedestrians is challenging due to their unpredictable movements. Current Reinforcement Learning-based motion planners rely on a single policy to simulate pedestrian movements and…
Self-navigation in non-coordinating crowded environments is formidably challenging within multi-agent systems consisting of non-holonomic robots operating through local sensing. Our primary objective is the development of a novel, rapid,…
In collective systems, the available agents are a limited resource that must be allocated among tasks to maximize collective performance. Computing the optimal allocation of several agents to numerous tasks through a brute-force approach…
We aim to enable a mobile robot to navigate through environments with dense crowds, e.g., shopping malls, canteens, train stations, or airport terminals. In these challenging environments, existing approaches suffer from two common…
Cooperatively avoiding collision is a critical functionality for robots navigating in dense human crowds, failure of which could lead to either overaggressive or overcautious behavior. A necessary condition for cooperative collision…
Robot navigation in crowded pedestrian environments is a well-known challenge and we explore the practical deployment of group-based representations in this setting. Pedestrian groups have been empirically shown to enable a mobile robot's…