Stranger Danger! Identifying and Avoiding Unpredictable Pedestrians in RL-based Social Robot Navigation

Reinforcement learning (RL) methods for social robot navigation show great success navigating robots through large crowds of people, but the performance of these learning-based methods tends to degrade in particularly challenging or unfamiliar situations due to the models’ dependency on representative training data. To ensure human safety and comfort, it is critical that these algorithms handle uncommon cases appropriately, but the low frequency and wide diversity of such situations present a significant challenge for these data-driven methods. To overcome this challenge, we propose modifications to the learning process that encourage these RL policies to maintain additional caution in unfamiliar situations. Specifically, we improve the Socially Attentive Reinforcement Learning (SARL) policy by (1) modifying the training process to systematically introduce deviations into a pedestrian model, (2) updating the value network to estimate and utilize pedestrian-unpredictability features, and (3) implementing a reward function to learn an effective response to pedestrian unpredictability. Compared to the original SARL policy, our modified policy maintains similar navigation times and path lengths, while reducing the number of collisions by 82% and reducing the proportion of time spent in the pedestrians’ personal space by up to 19 percentage points for the most difficult cases. We also describe how to apply these modifications to other RL policies and demonstrate that some key high-level behaviors of our approach transfer to a physical robot.