Social crowd navigation of a mobile robot based on human trajectory prediction and hybrid sensing

Abstract

This paper propose a hierarchical path planning algorithm that first captures the local crowd movement around the robot using RGB camera combined with LiDAR and predicts the movement of people nearby the robot, and then generates appropriate global path for the robot using the global path planner with the crowd information. After deciding the global path, the low-level control system receives the prediction results of the crowd and high-level global path, and generates the actual speed control commands for the robot after considering the social norms. With the high accuracy of computer vision for human recognition and the high precision of LiDAR, the system is able to accurately track the surrounding human locations. Through high-level path planning, the robot can use different movement strategies in different scenarios, while the crowd prediction allows the robot to generate more efficient and socially acceptable paths. With this system, even in a highly dynamic environment caused by the crowd, the robot can still plan an appropriate path reach the destination without causing psychological discomfort to others successfully.