Enhancing Social Robot Navigation with Integrated Motion Prediction and Trajectory Planning in Dynamic Human Environments

TL;DR

An integrative approach that combines motion prediction and trajectory planning to enable safe and socially-aware robot navigation by incorporating human interactive information including position, orientation, and motion into the objective function of the TEB algorithms is proposed.

Abstract

Navigating safely in dynamic human environments is crucial for mobile service robots, and social navigation is a key aspect of this process. In this paper, we proposed an integrative approach that combines motion prediction and trajectory planning to enable safe and socially-aware robot navigation. The main idea of the proposed method is to leverage the advantages of Socially Acceptable trajectory prediction and Timed Elastic Band (TEB) by incorporating human interactive information including position, orientation, and motion into the objective function of the TEB algorithms. In addition, we designed social constraints to ensure the safety of robot navigation. The proposed system is evaluated through physical simulation using both quantitative and qualitative metrics, demonstrating its superior performance in avoiding human and dynamic obstacles, thereby ensuring safe navigation. The implementations are open source at: \url{https://github.com/thanhnguyencanh/SGan-TEB.git}

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Overview of our proposed method. The system is composed of two main units: Socially Aware and Social Trajectory Planning
• Figure 2: Illustrative example of social navigation in the dynamic human environment. The robot needs to achieve a predetermined goal while safely avoiding moving people $s_1$ and $s_2$.
• Figure 3: Scenario 1: Reverse direction (a) simulation environment, (b) trajectory estimation, (c) real trajectory.
• Figure 4: Scenario 2: Multi-person (a) simulation environment, (b) trajectory estimation, (c) real trajectory (left: DWA, mid: TEB, right: MP-TEB).
• Figure 5: Scenario 3: Avoid door in corridor scenario: (a) simulation environment, (b) real trajectory.