SoNIC: Safe Social Navigation with Adaptive Conformal Inference and Constrained Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Yao, Jianpeng, Zhang, Xiaopan, Xia, Yu, Wang, Zejin, Roy-Chowdhury, Amit K., Li, Jiachen
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866910816017580032
author Yao, Jianpeng
Zhang, Xiaopan
Xia, Yu
Wang, Zejin
Roy-Chowdhury, Amit K.
Li, Jiachen
author_facet Yao, Jianpeng
Zhang, Xiaopan
Xia, Yu
Wang, Zejin
Roy-Chowdhury, Amit K.
Li, Jiachen
contents Reinforcement learning (RL) enables social robots to generate trajectories without relying on human-designed rules or interventions, making it generally more effective than rule-based systems in adapting to complex, dynamic real-world scenarios. However, social navigation is a safety-critical task that requires robots to avoid collisions with pedestrians, whereas existing RL-based solutions often fall short of ensuring safety in complex environments. In this paper, we propose SoNIC, which to the best of our knowledge is the first algorithm that integrates adaptive conformal inference (ACI) with constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) to enable safe policy learning for social navigation. Specifically, our method not only augments RL observations with ACI-generated nonconformity scores, which inform the agent of the quantified uncertainty but also employs these uncertainty estimates to effectively guide the behaviors of RL agents by using constrained reinforcement learning. This integration regulates the behaviors of RL agents and enables them to handle safety-critical situations. On the standard CrowdNav benchmark, our method achieves a success rate of 96.93%, which is 11.67% higher than the previous state-of-the-art RL method and results in 4.5 times fewer collisions and 2.8 times fewer intrusions to ground-truth human future trajectories as well as enhanced robustness in out-of-distribution scenarios. To further validate our approach, we deploy our algorithm on a real robot by developing a ROS2-based navigation system. Our experiments demonstrate that the system can generate robust and socially polite decision-making when interacting with both sparse and dense crowds. The video demos can be found on our project website: https://sonic-social-nav.github.io/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_17460
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SoNIC: Safe Social Navigation with Adaptive Conformal Inference and Constrained Reinforcement Learning
Yao, Jianpeng
Zhang, Xiaopan
Xia, Yu
Wang, Zejin
Roy-Chowdhury, Amit K.
Li, Jiachen
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
Reinforcement learning (RL) enables social robots to generate trajectories without relying on human-designed rules or interventions, making it generally more effective than rule-based systems in adapting to complex, dynamic real-world scenarios. However, social navigation is a safety-critical task that requires robots to avoid collisions with pedestrians, whereas existing RL-based solutions often fall short of ensuring safety in complex environments. In this paper, we propose SoNIC, which to the best of our knowledge is the first algorithm that integrates adaptive conformal inference (ACI) with constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) to enable safe policy learning for social navigation. Specifically, our method not only augments RL observations with ACI-generated nonconformity scores, which inform the agent of the quantified uncertainty but also employs these uncertainty estimates to effectively guide the behaviors of RL agents by using constrained reinforcement learning. This integration regulates the behaviors of RL agents and enables them to handle safety-critical situations. On the standard CrowdNav benchmark, our method achieves a success rate of 96.93%, which is 11.67% higher than the previous state-of-the-art RL method and results in 4.5 times fewer collisions and 2.8 times fewer intrusions to ground-truth human future trajectories as well as enhanced robustness in out-of-distribution scenarios. To further validate our approach, we deploy our algorithm on a real robot by developing a ROS2-based navigation system. Our experiments demonstrate that the system can generate robust and socially polite decision-making when interacting with both sparse and dense crowds. The video demos can be found on our project website: https://sonic-social-nav.github.io/.
title SoNIC: Safe Social Navigation with Adaptive Conformal Inference and Constrained Reinforcement Learning
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17460