HEIGHT: Heterogeneous Interaction Graph Transformer for Robot Navigation in Crowded and Constrained Environments

We study the problem of robot navigation in dense and interactive crowds with environmental constraints such as corridors and furniture. Previous methods fail to consider all types of interactions among agents and obstacles, leading to unsafe and inefficient robot paths. In this article, we leverage a graph-based representation of crowded and constrained scenarios and propose a structured framework to learn robot navigation policies with deep reinforcement learning. We first split the representations of different components in the environment and propose a heterogeneous spatio-temporal (st) graph to model distinct interactions among humans, robots, and obstacles. Based on the heterogeneous st-graph, we propose HEIGHT, a novel navigation policy network architecture with different components to capture heterogeneous interactions among entities through space and time. HEIGHT utilizes attention mechanisms to prioritize important interactions and a recurrent network to track changes in the dynamic scene over time, encouraging the robot to avoid collisions adaptively. Through extensive simulation and real-world experiments, we demonstrate that HEIGHT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of success and efficiency in challenging navigation scenarios. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our pipeline achieves better zero-shot generalization capability than previous works when the densities of humans and obstacles change. More videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/crowdnav-height/home.

Topology-Guided ORCA: Smooth Multi-Agent Motion Planning in Constrained Environments

We present Topology-Guided ORCA as an alternative simulator to replace ORCA for planning smooth multi-agent motions in environments with static obstacles. Despite the impressive performance in simulating multi-agent crowd motion in free space, ORCA encounters a significant challenge in navigating the agents with the presence of static obstacles. ORCA ignores static obstacles until an agent gets too close to an obstacle, and the agent will get stuck if the obstacle intercepts an agent's path toward the goal. To address this challenge, Topology-Guided ORCA constructs a graph to represent the topology of the traversable region of the environment. We use a path planner to plan a path of waypoints that connects each agent's start and goal positions. The waypoints are used as a sequence of goals to guide ORCA. The experiments of crowd simulation in constrained environments show that our method outperforms ORCA in terms of generating smooth and natural motions of multiple agents in constrained environments, which indicates great potential of Topology-Guided ORCA for serving as an effective simulator for training constrained social navigation policies.

Structured Graph Network for Constrained Robot Crowd Navigation with Low Fidelity Simulation

We investigate the feasibility of deploying reinforcement learning (RL) policies for constrained crowd navigation using a low-fidelity simulator. We introduce a representation of the dynamic environment, separating human and obstacle representations. Humans are represented through detected states, while obstacles are represented as computed point clouds based on maps and robot localization. This representation enables RL policies trained in a low-fidelity simulator to deploy in real world with a reduced sim2real gap. Additionally, we propose a spatio-temporal graph to model the interactions between agents and obstacles. Based on the graph, we use attention mechanisms to capture the robot-human, human-human, and human-obstacle interactions. Our method significantly improves navigation performance in both simulated and real-world environments. Video demonstrations can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/constrained-crowdnav/home.

Predicting Object Interactions with Behavior Primitives: An Application in Stowing Tasks

Stowing, the task of placing objects in cluttered shelves or bins, is a common task in warehouse and manufacturing operations. However, this task is still predominantly carried out by human workers as stowing is challenging to automate due to the complex multi-object interactions and long-horizon nature of the task. Previous works typically involve extensive data collection and costly human labeling of semantic priors across diverse object categories. This paper presents a method to learn a generalizable robot stowing policy from predictive model of object interactions and a single demonstration with behavior primitives. We propose a novel framework that utilizes Graph Neural Networks to predict object interactions within the parameter space of behavioral primitives. We further employ primitive-augmented trajectory optimization to search the parameters of a predefined library of heterogeneous behavioral primitives to instantiate the control action. Our framework enables robots to proficiently execute long-horizon stowing tasks with a few keyframes (3-4) from a single demonstration. Despite being solely trained in a simulation, our framework demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities. It efficiently adapts to a broad spectrum of real-world conditions, including various shelf widths, fluctuating quantities of objects, and objects with diverse attributes such as sizes and shapes.

DRAGON: A Dialogue-Based Robot for Assistive Navigation with Visual Language Grounding

Persons with visual impairments (PwVI) have difficulties understanding and navigating spaces around them. Current wayfinding technologies either focus solely on navigation or provide limited communication about the environment. Motivated by recent advances in visual-language grounding and semantic navigation, we propose DRAGON, a guiding robot powered by a dialogue system and the ability to associate the environment with natural language. By understanding the commands from the user, DRAGON is able to guide the user to the desired landmarks on the map, describe the environment, and answer questions from visual observations. Through effective utilization of dialogue, the robot can ground the user's free-form descriptions to landmarks in the environment, and give the user semantic information through spoken language. We conduct a user study with blindfolded participants in an everyday indoor environment. Our results demonstrate that DRAGON is able to communicate with the user smoothly, provide a good guiding experience, and connect users with their surrounding environment in an intuitive manner.

Designing a Wayfinding Robot for People with Visual Impairments

People with visual impairments (PwVI) often have difficulties navigating through unfamiliar indoor environments. However, current wayfinding tools are fairly limited. In this short paper, we present our in-progress work on a wayfinding robot for PwVI. The robot takes an audio command from the user that specifies the intended destination. Then, the robot autonomously plans a path to navigate to the goal. We use sensors to estimate the real-time position of the user, which is fed to the planner to improve the safety and comfort of the user. In addition, the robot describes the surroundings to the user periodically to prevent disorientation and potential accidents. We demonstrate the feasibility of our design in a public indoor environment. Finally, we analyze the limitations of our current design, as well as our insights and future work. A demonstration video can be found at https://youtu.be/BS9r5bkIass.

Learning Rewards and Skills to Follow Commands with A Data Efficient Visual-Audio Representation

Based on the recent advancements in representation learning, we propose a novel framework for command-following robots with raw sensor inputs. Previous RL-based methods are either difficult to continuously improve after the deployment or require a large number of new labels during the fine-tuning. Motivated by (self-)supervised contrastive learning literature, we propose a novel representation, named VAR++, that generates an intrinsic reward function for command-following robot tasks by associating images with sound commands. After the robot is deployed in a new domain, the representation can be updated intuitively and data-efficiently by non-experts, and the robot is able to fulfill sound commands without any hand-crafted reward functions. We demonstrate our approach on various sound types and robotic tasks, including navigation and manipulation with raw sensor inputs. In the simulated experiments, we show that our system can continually self-improve in previously unseen scenarios given fewer new labeled data, yet achieves better performance, compared with previous methods.

Structural Attention-Based Recurrent Variational Autoencoder for Highway Vehicle Anomaly Detection

In autonomous driving, detection of abnormal driving behaviors is essential to ensure the safety of vehicle controllers. Prior works in vehicle anomaly detection have shown that modeling interactions between agents improves detection accuracy, but certain abnormal behaviors where structured road information is paramount are poorly identified, such as wrong-way and off-road driving. We propose a novel unsupervised framework for highway anomaly detection named Structural Attention-based Recurrent VAE (SABeR-VAE), which explicitly uses the structure of the environment to aid anomaly identification. Specifically, we use a vehicle self-attention module to learn the relations among vehicles on a road, and a separate lane-vehicle attention module to model the importance of permissible lanes to aid in trajectory prediction. Conditioned on the attention modules' outputs, a recurrent encoder-decoder architecture with a stochastic Koopman operator-propagated latent space predicts the next states of vehicles. Our model is trained end-to-end to minimize prediction loss on normal vehicle behaviors, and is deployed to detect anomalies in (ab)normal scenarios. By combining the heterogeneous vehicle and lane information, SABeR-VAE and its deterministic variant, SABeR-AE, improve abnormal AUPR by 18% and 25% respectively on the simulated MAAD highway dataset. Furthermore, we show that the learned Koopman operator in SABeR-VAE enforces interpretable structure in the variational latent space. The results of our method indeed show that modeling environmental factors is essential to detecting a diverse set of anomalies in deployment.

Occlusion-Aware Crowd Navigation Using People as Sensors

Autonomous navigation in crowded spaces poses a challenge for mobile robots due to the highly dynamic, partially observable environment. Occlusions are highly prevalent in such settings due to a limited sensor field of view and obstructing human agents. Previous work has shown that observed interactive behaviors of human agents can be used to estimate potential obstacles despite occlusions. We propose integrating such social inference techniques into the planning pipeline. We use a variational autoencoder with a specially designed loss function to learn representations that are meaningful for occlusion inference. This work adopts a deep reinforcement learning approach to incorporate the learned representation for occlusion-aware planning. In simulation, our occlusion-aware policy achieves comparable collision avoidance performance to fully observable navigation by estimating agents in occluded spaces. We demonstrate successful policy transfer from simulation to the real-world Turtlebot 2i. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to use social occlusion inference for crowd navigation.

Socially Aware Robot Crowd Navigation with Interaction Graphs and Human Trajectory Prediction

We study the problem of safe and socially aware robot navigation in dense and interactive human crowds. Previous works use simplified methods to model the personal spaces of pedestrians and ignore the social compliance of the robot behaviors. In this paper, we provide a more accurate representation of personal zones of walking pedestrians with their future trajectories. The predicted personal zones are incorporated into a reinforcement learning framework to prevent the robot from intruding into the personal zones. To learn socially aware navigation policies, we propose a novel recurrent graph neural network with attention mechanisms to capture the interactions among agents through space and time. We demonstrate that our method enables the robot to achieve good navigation performance and non-invasiveness in challenging crowd navigation scenarios. We successfully transfer the policy learned in the simulator to a real-world TurtleBot 2i.