학술논문

SACSoN: Scalable Autonomous Control for Social Navigation
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett. Robotics and Automation Letters, IEEE. 9(1):49-56 Jan, 2024
Subject
Robotics and Control Systems
Computing and Processing
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Navigation
Robots
Behavioral sciences
Pedestrians
Predictive models
Perturbation methods
Visualization
Machine Learning for Robot Control
Data Sets for Robot Learning
social navigation
Language
ISSN
2377-3766
2377-3774
Abstract
Machine learning provides a powerful tool for building socially compliant robotic systems that go beyond simple predictive models of human behavior. By observing and understanding human interactions from past experiences, learning can enable effective social navigation behaviors directly from data. In this letter, our goal is to develop methods for training policies for socially unobtrusive behavior, such that robots can navigate among humans in ways that don't disturb human behavior in visual navigation using only onboard RGB observations. We introduce a definition for such behavior based on the counterfactual perturbation of the human: If the robot had not intruded into the space, would the human have acted in the same way? By minimizing this counterfactual perturbation, we can induce robots to behave in ways that do not alter the natural behavior of humans in the shared space. Instantiating this principle requires training policies to minimize their effect on human behavior, and this in turn requires data that allows us to model the behavior of humans in the presence of robots. Therefore, our approach is based on two key contributions. First, we collect a large dataset where an indoor mobile robot interacts with human bystanders. Second, we utilize this dataset to train policies that minimize counterfactual perturbation. We provide supplementary videos and make publicly available the visual navigation dataset on our project page.