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Human-Following and -guiding in Crowded Environments by Mobile Service Robots (arxiv.org)
1 point by PaulHoule on Jul 1, 2022 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Robots learn by trial and error to follow or guide a person through crowds, using extra clues about people's social states, safety, and types. Compared with the same learning setup without these clues, they navigated more safely and adapted better to people.

Abstract · Human-Following and -guiding in Crowded Environments using Semantic Deep-Reinforcement-Learning for Mobile Service Robots

Assistance robots have gained widespread attention in various industries such as logistics and human assistance. The tasks of guiding or following a human in a crowded environment such as airports or train stations to carry weight or goods is still an open problem. In these use cases, the robot is not only required to intelligently interact with humans, but also to navigate safely among crowds. Thus, especially highly dynamic environments pose a grand challenge due to the volatile behavior patterns and unpredictable movements of humans. In this paper, we propose a Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-based agent for human-guiding and -following tasks in crowded environments. Therefore, we incorporate semantic information to provide the agent with high-level information like the social states of humans, safety models, and class types. We evaluate our proposed approach against a benchmark approach without semantic information and demonstrated enhanced navigational safety and robustness. Moreover, we demonstrate that the agent could learn to adapt its behavior to humans, which improves the human-robot interaction significantly.

Linh Kästner, Bassel Fatloun, Zhengcheng Shen, Daniel Gawrisch, Jens Lambrecht
arXiv:2206.05771 · cs.RO, cs.HC · submitted Jun 12, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2022, 7 pages, 4 figures

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