Following Is All You Need: Robot Crowd Navigation Using People As Planners

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liao, Yuwen, Xu, Xinhang, Bai, Ruofei, Yang, Yizhuo, Cao, Muqing, Yuan, Shenghai, Xie, Lihua
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liao, Yuwen
Xu, Xinhang
Bai, Ruofei
Yang, Yizhuo
Cao, Muqing
Yuan, Shenghai
Xie, Lihua
author_facet Liao, Yuwen
Xu, Xinhang
Bai, Ruofei
Yang, Yizhuo
Cao, Muqing
Yuan, Shenghai
Xie, Lihua
contents Navigating in crowded environments requires the robot to be equipped with high-level reasoning and planning techniques. Existing works focus on developing complex and heavyweight planners while ignoring the role of human intelligence. Since humans are highly capable agents who are also widely available in a crowd navigation setting, we propose an alternative scheme where the robot utilises people as planners to benefit from their effective planning decisions and social behaviours. Through a set of rule-based evaluations, we identify suitable human leaders who exhibit the potential to guide the robot towards its goal. Using a simple base planner, the robot follows the selected leader through shorthorizon subgoals that are designed to be straightforward to achieve. We demonstrate through both simulated and real-world experiments that our novel framework generates safe and efficient robot plans compared to existing planners, even without predictive or data-driven modules. Our method also brings human-like robot behaviours without explicitly defining traffic rules and social norms. Code will be available at https://github.com/centiLinda/PeopleAsPlanner.git.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_10828
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Following Is All You Need: Robot Crowd Navigation Using People As Planners
Liao, Yuwen
Xu, Xinhang
Bai, Ruofei
Yang, Yizhuo
Cao, Muqing
Yuan, Shenghai
Xie, Lihua
Robotics
Navigating in crowded environments requires the robot to be equipped with high-level reasoning and planning techniques. Existing works focus on developing complex and heavyweight planners while ignoring the role of human intelligence. Since humans are highly capable agents who are also widely available in a crowd navigation setting, we propose an alternative scheme where the robot utilises people as planners to benefit from their effective planning decisions and social behaviours. Through a set of rule-based evaluations, we identify suitable human leaders who exhibit the potential to guide the robot towards its goal. Using a simple base planner, the robot follows the selected leader through shorthorizon subgoals that are designed to be straightforward to achieve. We demonstrate through both simulated and real-world experiments that our novel framework generates safe and efficient robot plans compared to existing planners, even without predictive or data-driven modules. Our method also brings human-like robot behaviours without explicitly defining traffic rules and social norms. Code will be available at https://github.com/centiLinda/PeopleAsPlanner.git.
title Following Is All You Need: Robot Crowd Navigation Using People As Planners
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10828