2,387 research outputs found
Socially Aware Motion Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learning
For robotic vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in pedestrian-rich
environments, it is important to model subtle human behaviors and navigation
rules (e.g., passing on the right). However, while instinctive to humans,
socially compliant navigation is still difficult to quantify due to the
stochasticity in people's behaviors. Existing works are mostly focused on using
feature-matching techniques to describe and imitate human paths, but often do
not generalize well since the feature values can vary from person to person,
and even run to run. This work notes that while it is challenging to directly
specify the details of what to do (precise mechanisms of human navigation), it
is straightforward to specify what not to do (violations of social norms).
Specifically, using deep reinforcement learning, this work develops a
time-efficient navigation policy that respects common social norms. The
proposed method is shown to enable fully autonomous navigation of a robotic
vehicle moving at human walking speed in an environment with many pedestrians.Comment: 8 page
Sequential Neural Barriers for Scalable Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance
There are two major challenges for scaling up robot navigation around dynamic
obstacles: the complex interaction dynamics of the obstacles can be hard to
model analytically, and the complexity of planning and control grows
exponentially in the number of obstacles. Data-driven and learning-based
methods are thus particularly valuable in this context. However, data-driven
methods are sensitive to distribution drift, making it hard to train and
generalize learned models across different obstacle densities. We propose a
novel method for compositional learning of Sequential Neural Control Barrier
models (SNCBFs) to achieve scalability. Our approach exploits an important
observation: the spatial interaction patterns of multiple dynamic obstacles can
be decomposed and predicted through temporal sequences of states for each
obstacle. Through decomposition, we can generalize control policies trained
only with a small number of obstacles, to environments where the obstacle
density can be 100x higher. We demonstrate the benefits of the proposed methods
in improving dynamic collision avoidance in comparison with existing methods
including potential fields, end-to-end reinforcement learning, and
model-predictive control. We also perform hardware experiments and show the
practical effectiveness of the approach in the supplementary video.Comment: To be published in IROS 202
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