mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Socially Aware Motion Planning with Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv 1703.08862 ↗First posted 26 Mar 2017cs.RO cs.AI cs.HCcited by 128

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Abstract (arXiv)

For robotic vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in pedestrian-rich environments, it is important to model subtle human behaviors and navigation rules (e.g., passing on the right). However, while instinctive to humans, socially compliant navigation is still difficult to quantify due to the stochasticity in people's behaviors. Existing works are mostly focused on using feature-matching techniques to describe and imitate human paths, but often do not generalize well since the feature values can vary from person to person, and even run to run. This work notes that while it is challenging to directly specify the details of what to do (precise mechanisms of human navigation), it is straightforward to specify what not to do (violations of social norms). Specifically, using deep reinforcement learning, this work develops a time-efficient navigation policy that respects common social norms. The proposed method is shown to enable fully autonomous navigation of a robotic vehicle moving at human walking speed in an environment with many pedestrians.

Key facts. Cited by 128 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2017.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 32; 2022: 22; 2023: 24; 2024: 23; 2025: 16; 2026: 11.

128 papers.

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  1. 2024Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics: A Survey of Real-World Successescited by 153
  2. 2022Socially Compliant Navigation Dataset (SCAND): A Large-Scale Dataset of Demonstrations for Social Navigationcited by 122
  3. 2021Learning Safe Multi-Agent Control with Decentralized Neural Barrier Certificatescited by 71
  4. 2023SACSoN: Scalable Autonomous Control for Social Navigationcited by 60
  5. 2021Memory-based Deep Reinforcement Learning for POMDPscited by 53
  6. 2023Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Robot Navigation Algorithmscited by 52
  7. 2022Intention Aware Robot Crowd Navigation with Attention-Based Interaction Graphcited by 46
  8. 2021Review of Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction Methods: Comparing Deep Learning and Knowledge-based Approachescited by 30
  9. 2021Social Coordination and Altruism in Autonomous Drivingcited by 28
  10. 2021Explainable Reinforcement Learning for Broad-XAI: A Conceptual Framework and Surveycited by 24
  11. 2021A Survey on Human-aware Robot Navigationcited by 23
  12. 2022Safe Reinforcement Learning Using Black-Box Reachability Analysiscited by 22
38 more
  1. 2021Levels of explainable artificial intelligence for human-aligned conversational explanationscited by 21
  2. 2021Where to go next: Learning a Subgoal Recommendation Policy for Navigation Among Pedestrianscited by 20
  3. 2024Multi-Agent Dynamic Relational Reasoning for Social Robot Navigationcited by 20
  4. 2023On the Convergence and Sample Complexity Analysis of Deep Q-Networks with ε-Greedy Explorationcited by 17
  5. 2023ViHOPE: Visuotactile In-Hand Object 6D Pose Estimation with Shape Completioncited by 14
  6. 2021Risk-Conditioned Distributional Soft Actor-Critic for Risk-Sensitive Navigationcited by 13
  7. 2021Conflict Avoidance in Social Navigation -- a Surveycited by 13
  8. 2021Arena-Rosnav: Towards Deployment of Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-Based Obstacle Avoidance into Conventional Autonomous Navigation Systemscited by 12
  9. 2022A Survey on Large-Population Systems and Scalable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learningcited by 12
  10. 2025SocialNav: Training Human-Inspired Foundation Model for Socially-Aware Embodied Navigationcited by 12
  11. 2021From Learning to Relearning: A Framework for Diminishing Bias in Social Robot Navigationcited by 11
  12. 2022Position-Agnostic Autonomous Navigation in Vineyards with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 11
  13. 2021Learning Sparse Interaction Graphs of Partially Detected Pedestrians for Trajectory Predictioncited by 10
  14. 2024From Cognition to Precognition: A Future-Aware Framework for Social Navigationcited by 10
  15. 2025SocialNav-SUB: Benchmarking VLMs for Scene Understanding in Social Robot Navigationcited by 10
  16. 2021Efficient Performance Bounds for Primal-Dual Reinforcement Learning from Demonstrationscited by 9
  17. 2023HabiCrowd: A High Performance Simulator for Crowd-Aware Visual Navigationcited by 9
  18. 2022Occlusion-Aware Crowd Navigation Using People as Sensorscited by 8
  19. 2023Sequential Neural Barriers for Scalable Dynamic Obstacle Avoidancecited by 8
  20. 2024SELFI: Autonomous Self-Improvement with Reinforcement Learning for Social Navigationcited by 8
  21. 2021Human-Inspired Multi-Agent Navigation using Knowledge Distillationcited by 7
  22. 2022Federated Reinforcement Learning for Collective Navigation of Robotic Swarmscited by 7
  23. 2022NavDreams: Towards Camera-Only RL Navigation Among Humanscited by 7
  24. 2024DR-MPC: Deep Residual Model Predictive Control for Real-world Social Navigationcited by 7
  25. 2025Discrete GCBF Proximal Policy Optimization for Multi-agent Safe Optimal Controlcited by 7
  26. 2025Multi-Agent LLM Actor-Critic Framework for Social Robot Navigationcited by 7
  27. 2022SOCIALMAPF: Optimal and Efficient Multi-Agent Path Finding with Strategic Agents for Social Navigationcited by 6
  28. 2022Exploiting Proximity-Aware Tasks for Embodied Social Navigationcited by 6
  29. 2024REValueD: Regularised Ensemble Value-Decomposition for Factorisable Markov Decision Processescited by 6
  30. 2024GSON: A Group-based Social Navigation Framework with Large Multimodal Modelcited by 6
  31. 2021Connecting Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-based Obstacle Avoidance with Conventional Global Planners using Waypoint Generatorscited by 5
  32. 2021Benchmarking Augmentation Methods for Learning Robust Navigation Agents: the Winning Entry of the 2021 iGibson Challengecited by 5
  33. 2024Socially Integrated Navigation: A Social Acting Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
  34. 2024Uncertainty-Aware DRL for Autonomous Vehicle Crowd Navigation in Shared Spacecited by 5
  35. 2026From Obstacles to Etiquette: Robot Social Navigation with VLM-Informed Path Selectioncited by 5
  36. 2021Robot Navigation in a Crowd by Integrating Deep Reinforcement Learning and Online Planningcited by 4
  37. 2021Enhancing Navigational Safety in Crowded Environments using Semantic-Deep-Reinforcement-Learning-based Navigationcited by 4
  38. 2021Multi-agent Soft Actor-Critic Based Hybrid Motion Planner for Mobile Robotscited by 4

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