SocialNav-FTI: Field-Theory-Inspired Social-aware Navigation Framework based on Human Behavior and Social Norms

Siyi Lu, Ping Zhong, Shuqi Ye, Bolei Chen, Yu Sheng, Run Liu

Abstract: Social navigation is a key consideration for integrating robots into human environments. Concurrently, it imposes heightened requisites: tasks must not only be executed succesfully without collisions, but also adhere to principles encompassing comprehensibility, courtesy, social compliance, comprehension, foresight, and scenario compliance. In this paper, we present the incorporation of social norms as a guiding framework for robot navigation within social contexts. We adopt field theory to provide a formal elucidation of the social norms, using Physical-Informed Neural Network (PINN) to predict pedestrian movement under the influence of social norms, respectively, and using Reinforcement Learning (RL) for navigation. We use supervised learning to train the pedestrian velocity field prediction model and reinforcement learning to train the navigation policy. We conduct three parts of experiments: (1) analyzing the spatiotemporal characteristics of the velocity field in the walking pedestrians dataset; (2) evaluating the accuracy of the vector field prediction in the pedestrian dataset; (3) using Gazebo simulation and the PEDSIM library to evaluate the improvement of navigation performance under constraints of social norms. Experiments have confirmed that the pedestrian motion data set indeed satisfies the Gaussian divergence theorem and can be described by the concept of field. The performance of navigation strategies incorporating social rules has been improved to a certain extent.