Mobility in an effective and socially-compliant manner is an essential yet challenging task for robots operating in crowded spaces. Recent works have shown the power of deep reinforcement learning techniques to learn socially cooperative policies. However, their cooperation ability deteriorates as the crowd grows since they typically relax the problem as a one-way Human-Robot interaction problem. In this work, we want to go beyond first-order Human-Robot interaction and more explicitly model Crowd-Robot Interaction (CRI). We propose to (i) rethink pairwise interactions with a self-attention mechanism, and (ii) jointly model Human-Robot as well as Human-Human interactions in the deep reinforcement learning framework. Our model captures the Human-Human interactions occurring in dense crowds that indirectly affects the robot's anticipation capability. Our proposed attentive pooling mechanism learns the collective importance of neighboring humans with respect to their future states. Various experiments demonstrate that our model can anticipate human dynamics and navigate in crowds with time efficiency, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
High-speed, low-latency obstacle avoidance that is insensitive to sensor noise is essential for enabling multiple decentralized robots to function reliably in cluttered and dynamic environments. While other distributed multiagent collision avoidance systems exist, these systems require online geometric optimization where tedious parameter tuning and perfect sensing are necessary. We present a novel end-to-end framework to generate reactive collision avoidance policy for efficient distributed multiagent navigation. Our method formulates an agent's navigation strategy as a deep neural network mapping from the observed noisy sensor measurements to the agent's steering commands in terms of movement velocity. We train the network on a large number of frames of collision avoidance data collected by repeatedly running a multiagent simulator with different parameter settings. We validate the learned deep neural network policy in a set of simulated and real scenarios with noisy measurements and demonstrate that our method is able to generate a robust navigation strategy that is insensitive to imperfect sensing and works reliably in all situations. We also show that our method can be well generalized to scenarios that do not appear in our training data, including scenes with static obstacles and agents with different sizes. Videos are available at https: sites.google.com view deepmaca.  Mobile robots that operate in a shared environment with humans need the ability to predict the movements of people to better plan their navigation actions. In this paper, we present a novel approach to predict the movements of pedestrians. Our method reasons about entire trajectories that arise from interactions between people in navigation tasks. It applies a maximum entropy learning method based on features that capture relevant aspects of the trajectories to determine the probability distribution that underlies human navigation behavior. Hence, our approach can be used by mobile robots to predict forthcoming interactions with pedestrians and thus react in a socially compliant way. In extensive experiments, we evaluate the capability and accuracy of our approach and demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the popular social forces method, a state-of-the-art approach. Furthermore, we show how our algorithm can be used for autonomous robot navigation using a real robot.  Making an optimal decision to avoid obstacles while heading to the goal is one of the fundamental challenges for mobile robots equipped with limited computational resources. In this paper, we present a deep imitation learning algorithm that develops a computationally efficient obstacle avoidance policy based on egocentric local occupancy maps. The trained model embedded with a variant of the value iteration networks is able to provide near-optimal continuous action commands through fast feed-forward inferences and generalize well to unseen planning-based scenarios. To improve the policy robustness, we augment the training data set with artificially generated maps, which effectively alleviates the shortage of catastrophic samples in normal demonstrations. Extensive experiments on a Segway robot show the effectiveness of the proposed approach in terms of solution optimality, robustness as well as computation time. We present an approach for mobile robots to learn to navigate in dynamic environments with pedestrians via raw depth inputs, in a socially compliant manner. To achieve this, we adopt a generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) strategy, which improves upon a pre-trained behavior cloning policy. Our approach overcomes the disadvantages of previous methods, as they heavily depend on the full knowledge of the location and velocity information of nearby pedestrians, which not only requires specific sensors, but also the extraction of such state information from raw sensory input could consume much computation time. In this paper, our proposed GAIL-based model performs directly on raw depth inputs and plans in real-time. Experiments show that our GAIL-based approach greatly improves the safety and efficiency of the behavior of mobile robots from pure behavior cloning. The real-world deployment also shows that our method is capable of guiding autonomous vehicles to navigate in a socially compliant manner directly through raw depth inputs. In addition, we release a simulation plugin for modeling pedestrian behaviors based on the social force model.