Understanding human behavior is key for robots and intelligent systems that share a space with people. Accordingly, research that enables such systems to perceive, track, learn and predict human behavior as well as to plan and interact with humans has received increasing attention over the last years. The availability of large human motion datasets that contain relevant levels of difficulty is fundamental to this research. Existing datasets are often limited in terms of information content, annotation quality or variability of human behavior. In this paper, we present THÖR, a new dataset with human motion trajectory and eye gaze data collected in an indoor environment with accurate ground truth for position, head orientation, gaze direction, social grouping, obstacles map and goal coordinates. THÖR also contains sensor data collected by a 3D lidar and involves a mobile robot navigating the space. We propose a set of metrics to quantitatively analyze motion trajectory datasets such as the average tracking duration, ground truth noise, curvature and speed variation of the trajectories. In comparison to prior art, our dataset has a larger variety in human motion behavior, is less noisy, and contains annotations at higher frequencies.
LAAS-CNRS, Universit de Toulouse, CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心系统分析与架构实验室，图卢兹大学，法国国家科学研究中心）
We claim that navigation in human environments can be viewed as cooperative activity especially in constrained situations. Humans concurrently aid and comply with each other while moving in a shared space. Cooperation helps pedestrians to efficiently reach their own goals and respect conventions such as the personal space of others. To meet human comparable efficiency, a robot needs to predict the human trajectories and plan its own trajectory correspondingly in the same shared space. In this work, we present a navigation planner that is able to plan such cooperative trajectories, simultaneous…
Towards Edge Intelligence via Autonomous Navigation: A Robot-Assisted Data Collection Approach
College of Information Science and Technology, Jinan University（暨南大学信息科学技术学院）；College of Physics and Information Engineering, Fuzhou University（福州大学物理与信息工程学院）；School of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Guangzhou University（广州大学电子与通信工程学院）；School of Computer Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学计算机学院）
Ohio State University（俄亥俄州立大学）；Ottonomy Inc.（Ottonomy公司）
The popularity of mobile robots has been steadily growing, with these robots being increasingly utilized to execute tasks previously completed by human workers. For bipedal robots to see this same success, robust autonomous navigation systems need to be developed that can execute in real-time and respond to dynamic environments. These systems can be divided into three stages: perception, planning, and control. A holistic navigation framework for bipedal robots must successfully integrate all three components of the autonomous navigation problem to enable robust real-world navigation. In this p…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Amazon Lab126（亚马逊Lab126）
We present an algorithm for safe robot navigation in complex dynamic environments using a variant of model predictive equilibrium point control. We use an optimization formulation to navigate robots gracefully in dynamic environments by optimizing over a trajectory cost function at each timestep. We present a novel trajectory cost formulation that significantly reduces the conservative and deadlock behaviors and generates smooth trajectories. In particular, we propose a new collision probability function that effectively captures the risk associated with a given configuration and the time to a…
With growth in the use of autonomous Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) for automated data collection from construction projects, the problem of inter-disciplinary semantic data sharing and exchanges between construction and robotic domains has attracted construction stakeholders' attention. Cross-domain data translation requires detailed specifications especially when it comes to semantic data translation. Building Information Modeling (BIM) and Geographic Information System (GIS) are the two technologies to capture and store construction data for indoor structure and outdoor environment respectiv…
We present TerraPN, a novel method that learns the surface properties (traction, bumpiness, deformability, etc.) of complex outdoor terrains directly from robot-terrain interactions through self-supervised learning, and uses it for autonomous robot navigation. Our method uses RGB images of terrain surfaces and the robot's velocities as inputs, and the IMU vibrations and odometry errors experienced by the robot as labels for self-supervision. Our method computes a surface cost map that differentiates smooth, high-traction surfaces (low navigation costs) from bumpy, slippery, deformable surfaces…
Towards Data-Driven Metrics for Social Robot Navigation Benchmarking
Aston University（阿斯顿大学）；Logical Robotics（逻辑机器人公司）；University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；TOYOTA Motor North America（丰田北美公司）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；LAAS-CNRS（LAAS-CNRS研究所）；George Mason University（乔治·梅森大学）
Prevalent solutions for Connected and Autonomous vehicle (CAV) mapping include high definition map (HD map) or real-time Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). Both methods only rely on vehicle itself (onboard sensors or embedded maps) and can not adapt well to temporarily changed drivable areas such as work zones. Navigating CAVs in such areas heavily relies on how the vehicle defines drivable areas based on perception information. Difficulties in improving perception accuracy and ensuring the correct interpretation of perception results are challenging to the vehicle in these situatio…
Humans can robustly follow a visual trajectory defined by a sequence of images (i.e. a video) regardless of substantial changes in the environment or the presence of obstacles. We aim at endowing similar visual navigation capabilities to mobile robots solely equipped with a RGB fisheye camera. We propose a novel probabilistic visual navigation system that learns to follow a sequence of images with bidirectional visual predictions conditioned on possible navigation velocities. By predicting bidirectionally (from start towards goal and vice versa) our method extends its predictive horizon enabli…
This paper shows the achievement of a sensing and navigation system of aerial robot for measuring location and size of trees in a forest environment autonomously. Although forestry is an important industry in Japan, the working population of forestry is decreasing. Then, as an application of mechanization of forestry, we propose tree data collection system by aerial robots which have high mobility in three-dimensional space. First, we develop tree recognition and measurement method, along with algorithm to generate tree database. Second, we describe aerial robot navigation system based on tree…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) demonstrates its potential in learning a model-free navigation policy for robot visual navigation. However, the data-demanding algorithm relies on a large number of navigation trajectories in training. Existing datasets supporting training such robot navigation algorithms consist of either 3D synthetic scenes or reconstructed scenes. Synthetic data suffers from domain gap to the real-world scenes while visual inputs rendered from 3D reconstructed scenes have undesired holes and artifacts. In this paper, we present a new dataset collected in real-world to facil…
Learning Traversability for Long Horizon Off-Road Navigation
J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University（德克萨斯农工大学J. Mike Walker '66机械工程系）；DEVCOM Army Research laboratory（陆军研究实验室）
EnQuery: Ensemble Policies for Diverse Query-Generation in Preference Alignment of Robot Navigation
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Center for Robotics at the University of Bonn（波恩大学机器人中心）；Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence（拉马尔机器学习与人工智能研究所）
We present an analytical method to estimate the continuous-time collision probability of motion plans for autonomous agents with linear controlled Ito dynamics. Motion plans generated by planning algorithms cannot be perfectly executed by autonomous agents in reality due to the inherent uncertainties in the real world. Estimating end-to-end risk is crucial to characterize the safety of trajectories and plan risk optimal trajectories. In this paper, we derive upper bounds for the continuous-time risk in stochastic robot navigation using the properties of Brownian motion as well as Boole and Hun…
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学保罗 G. 艾伦计算机科学与工程学院）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Learning high-level navigation behaviors has important implications: it enables robots to build compact visual memory for repeating demonstrations and to build sparse topological maps for planning in novel environments. Existing approaches only learn discrete, short-horizon behaviors. These standalone behaviors usually assume a discrete action space with simple robot dynamics, thus they cannot capture the intricacy and complexity of real-world trajectories. To this end, we propose Composable Behavior Embedding (CBE), a continuous behavior representation for long-horizon visual navigation. CBE …
NORM-Nav: Zero-Shot Mobile Robot Navigation with Natural Language Behavioral Constraints
College of Information Science and Technology, Beijing University of Chemical Technology（北京化工大学信息科学与技术学院）；Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院）；Institute of Systems Engineering and Collaborative Laboratory for Intelligent Science and Systems, Macau University of Science and Technology（澳门大学系统工程与智能科学与系统联合实验室）；School of Vehicle and Mobility, Tsinghua University（清华大学车辆与移动系统学院）
SkipWorld: Latent Skip Planning with Distilled World Models for Efficient Visual Navigation
Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University（清华大学人工智能产业研究院（AIR））；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
We present novel upper and lower bounds to estimate the collision probability of motion plans for autonomous agents with discrete-time linear Gaussian dynamics. Motion plans generated by planning algorithms cannot be perfectly executed by autonomous agents in reality due to the inherent uncertainties in the real world. Estimating collision probability is crucial to characterize the safety of trajectories and plan risk optimal trajectories. Our approach is an application of standard results in probability theory including the inequalities of Hunter, Kounias, Frechet, and Dawson. Using a ground …
IIIT Hyderabad（国际信息技术研究所海得拉巴分校）；University of Tartu（塔尔图大学）
We present UrbanFly: an uncertainty-aware real-time planning framework for quadrotor navigation in urban high-rise environments. A core aspect of UrbanFly is its ability to robustly plan directly on the sparse point clouds generated by a Monocular Visual Inertial SLAM (VINS) backend. It achieves this by using the sparse point clouds to build an uncertainty-integrated cuboid representation of the environment through a data-driven monocular plane segmentation network. Our chosen world model provides faster distance queries than the more common voxel-grid representation, and UrbanFly leverages th…
We present a real-time, data-driven algorithm to enhance the social-invisibility of robots within crowds. Our approach is based on prior psychological research, which reveals that people notice and--importantly--react negatively to groups of social actors when they have high entitativity, moving in a tight group with similar appearances and trajectories. In order to evaluate that behavior, we performed a user study to develop navigational algorithms that minimize entitativity. This study establishes a mapping between emotional reactions and multi-robot trajectories and appearances and further …
Hybrid Feedback Control for Global Navigation with Locally Optimal Obstacle Avoidance in n-Dimensional Spaces
Department of Electrical Engineering, Lakehead University（电气工程系，拉科夫大学）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Quebec in Outaouais（计算机科学与工程系，魁北克大学瓦省分校）
DynFly: Dynamic-Aware Continuous Trajectory Generation for UAV Vision-Language Navigation in Urban Environments
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Dalian University of Technology（大连理工大学）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）
University of Bonn（波恩大学）；Fraunhofer FKIE（弗劳恩霍夫通信、信息处理与人机工程研究所）
For the most comfortable, human-aware robot navigation, subjective user preferences need to be taken into account. This paper presents a novel reinforcement learning framework to train a personalized navigation controller along with an intuitive virtual reality demonstration interface. The conducted user study provides evidence that our personalized approach significantly outperforms classical approaches with more comfortable human-robot experiences. We achieve these results using only a few demonstration trajectories from non-expert users, who predominantly appreciate the intuitive demonstrat…
Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学应用物理实验室）
Robot navigation traditionally relies on building an explicit map that is used to plan collision-free trajectories to a desired target. In deformable, complex terrain, using geometric-based approaches can fail to find a path due to mischaracterizing deformable objects as rigid and impassable. Instead, we learn to predict an estimate of traversability of terrain regions and to prefer regions that are easier to navigate (e.g., short grass over small shrubs). Rather than predicting collisions, we instead regress on realized error compared to a canonical dynamics model. We train with an on-policy …
WorldMAP: Bootstrapping Vision-Language Navigation Trajectory Prediction with Generative World Models
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Shandong University（山东大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Zhongguancun Academy（中关村学院）
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 learning from trial-and-error for real-world robots is logistically challenging, and methods that instead can utilize existing datasets of robotic navigation data could be significantly more scalable and enable broader generalization. In this paper, we present ReViND, the first offline RL system for robotic navigation that can leverage previously collected data …
University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校）
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 boundary of a kernel perceptron classifier. We develop an online training algorithm that maintains a very sparse set of support vectors to represent obstacle boundaries in configuration space. We also derive conditions that allow complete (without sampling) collision-checking for piecewise-linear and piecewise-polynomial robot trajectories. We demonstrate the…
Western University（西安大略大学）；University of Quebec in Outaouais（魁北克大学乌塔韦校区）；Lakehead University（湖首大学）
We develop an autonomous navigation algorithm for a robot operating in two-dimensional environments cluttered with obstacles having arbitrary convex shapes. The proposed navigation approach relies on a hybrid feedback to guarantee global asymptotic stabilization of the robot towards a predefined target location while ensuring the forward invariance of the obstacle-free workspace. The main idea consists in designing an appropriate switching strategy between the move-to-target mode and the obstacle-avoidance mode based on the proximity of the robot with respect to the nearest obstacle. The propo…
Evaluation of Safety Constraints in Autonomous Navigation with Deep Reinforcement Learning
Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology（莫斯科物理技术学院）；AIRI（AIRI（人工智能研究所））；Federal Research Center for Computer Science and Control of Russian Academy of Sciences（俄罗斯科学院计算机科学与控制联邦研究中心）
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；U.S. Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）
We present a robot navigation system that uses an imitation learning framework to successfully navigate in complex environments. Our framework takes a pre-built 3D scan of a real environment and trains an agent from pre-generated expert trajectories to navigate to any position given a panoramic view of the goal and the current visual input without relying on map, compass, odometry, or relative position of the target at runtime. Our end-to-end trained agent uses RGB and depth (RGBD) information and can handle large environments (up to $1031m^2$) across multiple rooms (up to $40$) and generalize…
