Improving the Robustness of Social Robot Navigation Systems

Abstract

Our aim is to advance the reliability of autonomous social navigation. We have researched how simulation may advance this goal via crowdsourcing. We recently proposed the Simulation Environment for Autonomous Navigation (SEAN) and deployed it at scale on the web to quickly collect data via the SEAN Experimental Platform (SEAN-EP). Using this platform, we studied participants' perceptions of a robot when seen in a video versus interacting with it in simulation. Our current research builds on this prior work to make autonomous social navigation more reliable by classifying and automatically detecting navigation errors.