Socially Compliant Navigation in dense crowds

Abstract

Navigating in complex and highly dynamic environments such as crowds is still a major challenge for autonomous vehicle such as autonomous wheelchairs or even autonomous cars. This article presents a new way of navigating in crowds by using behavioral clustering for the surrounding agents and representing the crowd as a set of moving polygons. Once the environment has been modelled in this way and the robot has all the information it needs, we then propose a navigation algorithm that is able to guide the vehicle through the scene. The key-points of this algorithm are that (1) it can avoid densely-populated areas in order to minimize the risk of being on a collision course with any of the surrounding dynamic obstacles, (2) it generates socially compliant trajectories.