Nhat M. Nguyen
Papers
2
Total Citations
80
H-Index
2
About
Nhat M. Nguyen is a leading researcher in autonomous navigation, focusing on the intersection of robotics, reinforcement learning, and human-robot interaction. His work addresses the critical challenge of enabling robots to navigate safely and socially in dynamic, human-populated environments. Nguyen’s most impactful contribution, "Mapless Navigation among Dynamics with Social-safety-awareness," introduces a novel reinforcement learning approach that uses 2D laser scans to achieve collision avoidance. This work, with 71 citations, is distinguished by its dual-safety framework: ego-safety, which measures collision risk from the robot’s perspective, and social-safety, which evaluates the robot’s impact on surrounding pedestrians. This human-centric design is a major step toward socially acceptable autonomous systems. In his subsequent work on autonomous driving (9 citations), Nguyen pioneered the use of predictive representations in deep reinforcement learning, demonstrating superior performance and generalization on unseen test roads in both simulation and on a real Jackal robot. By bridging simulation and real-world deployment, Nguyen’s research is shaping the future of safe, socially-aware mobile robots, from service robots to autonomous vehicles.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 2