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Core Challenges of Social Robot Navigation: A Survey

arXiv 2103.05668 ↗First posted 9 Mar 2021cs.RO cs.HCcited by 97

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Abstract (arXiv)

Robot navigation in crowded public spaces is a complex task that requires addressing a variety of engineering and human factors challenges. These challenges have motivated a great amount of research resulting in important developments for the fields of robotics and human-robot interaction over the past three decades. Despite the significant progress and the massive recent interest, we observe a number of significant remaining challenges that prohibit the seamless deployment of autonomous robots in public pedestrian environments. In this survey article, we organize existing challenges into a set of categories related to broader open problems in motion planning, behavior design, and evaluation methodologies. Within these categories, we review past work, and offer directions for future research. Our work builds upon and extends earlier survey efforts by a) taking a critical perspective and diagnosing fundamental limitations of adopted practices in the field and b) offering constructive feedback and ideas that we aspire will drive research in the field over the coming decade.

Key facts. Cited by 97 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2021.

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 3; 2022: 9; 2023: 14; 2024: 29; 2025: 30; 2026: 12.

97 papers.

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  1. 2025VLN-R1: Vision-Language Navigation via Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 61
  2. 2023SACSoN: Scalable Autonomous Control for Social Navigationcited by 60
  3. 2023Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Robot Navigation Algorithmscited by 52
  4. 2024VLM-Social-Nav: Socially Aware Robot Navigation through Scoring using Vision-Language Modelscited by 46
  5. 2025TrackVLA: Embodied Visual Tracking in the Wildcited by 46
  6. 2024ExACT: Language-guided Conceptual Reasoning and Uncertainty Estimation for Event-based Action Recognition and Morecited by 33
  7. 2021Core Challenges in Embodied Vision-Language Planningcited by 30
  8. 2022Learning Model Predictive Controllers with Real-Time Attention for Real-World Navigationcited by 27
  9. 2025Recognition through Reasoning: Reinforcing Image Geo-localization with Large Vision-Language Modelscited by 27
  10. 2024Multi-Agent Dynamic Relational Reasoning for Social Robot Navigationcited by 20
  11. 2024Active Test-Time Adaptation: Theoretical Analyses and An Algorithmcited by 18
  12. 2021Conflict Avoidance in Social Navigation -- a Surveycited by 13
38 more
  1. 2025EgoNormia: Benchmarking Physical Social Norm Understandingcited by 13
  2. 2022EvolveHypergraph: Group-Aware Dynamic Relational Reasoning for Trajectory Predictioncited by 10
  3. 2024From Cognition to Precognition: A Future-Aware Framework for Social Navigationcited by 10
  4. 2024SpikMamba: When SNN meets Mamba in Event-based Human Action Recognitioncited by 10
  5. 2025SocialNav-SUB: Benchmarking VLMs for Scene Understanding in Social Robot Navigationcited by 10
  6. 2024SELFI: Autonomous Self-Improvement with Reinforcement Learning for Social Navigationcited by 8
  7. 2022SOCIALMAPF: Optimal and Efficient Multi-Agent Path Finding with Strategic Agents for Social Navigationcited by 6
  8. 2024GSON: A Group-based Social Navigation Framework with Large Multimodal Modelcited by 6
  9. 2024HEIGHT: Heterogeneous Interaction Graph Transformer for Robot Navigation in Crowded and Constrained Environmentscited by 6
  10. 2022A Cognitive Framework for Delegation Between Error-Prone AI and Human Agentscited by 5
  11. 2023SOCIALGYM 2.0: Simulator for Multi-Agent Social Robot Navigation in Shared Human Spacescited by 5
  12. 2023TBD Pedestrian Data Collection: Towards Rich, Portable, and Large-Scale Natural Pedestrian Datacited by 5
  13. 2024Hypergraph-Transformer (HGT) for Interactive Event Prediction in Laparoscopic and Robotic Surgerycited by 5
  14. 2024Socially Integrated Navigation: A Social Acting Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
  15. 2024Uncertainty-Aware DRL for Autonomous Vehicle Crowd Navigation in Shared Spacecited by 5
  16. 2025ViLAM: Distilling Vision-Language Reasoning into Attention Maps for Social Robot Navigationcited by 5
  17. 2025TrajEvo: Designing Trajectory Prediction Heuristics via LLM-driven Evolutioncited by 5
  18. 2025TrajEvo: Trajectory Prediction Heuristics Design via LLM-driven Evolutioncited by 5
  19. 2025Towards Generalizable Safety in Crowd Navigation via Conformal Uncertainty Handlingcited by 5
  20. 2025Social 3D Scene Graphs: Modeling Human Actions and Relations for Interactive Service Robotscited by 5
  21. 2025SocialNav-MoE: A Mixture-of-Experts Vision Language Model for Socially Compliant Navigation with Reinforcement Fine-Tuningcited by 5
  22. 2026From Obstacles to Etiquette: Robot Social Navigation with VLM-Informed Path Selectioncited by 5
  23. 2022T2FPV: Dataset and Method for Correcting First-Person View Errors in Pedestrian Trajectory Predictioncited by 4
  24. 2023A Study on Learning Social Robot Navigation with Multimodal Perceptioncited by 4
  25. 2024Long-Term Typhoon Trajectory Prediction: A Physics-Conditioned Approach Without Reanalysis Datacited by 4
  26. 2024Attention Graph for Multi-Robot Social Navigation with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 4
  27. 2024Unifying Large Language Model and Deep Reinforcement Learning for Human-in-Loop Interactive Socially-aware Navigationcited by 4
  28. 2025HRIBench: Benchmarking Vision-Language Models for Real-Time Human Perception in Human-Robot Interactioncited by 4
  29. 2025Artificial Intelligent Disobedience: Rethinking the Agency of Our Artificial Teammatescited by 4
  30. 2022Gesture2Path: Imitation Learning for Gesture-aware Navigationcited by 3
  31. 2022Learning Social Navigation from Demonstrations with Conditional Neural Processescited by 3
  32. 2023SocNavGym: A Reinforcement Learning Gym for Social Navigationcited by 3
  33. 2023Optimizing Algorithms From Pairwise User Preferencescited by 3
  34. 2024Mixed Strategy Nash Equilibrium for Crowd Navigationcited by 3
  35. 2025Learning Implicit Social Navigation Behavior using Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
  36. 2025EgoCogNav: Cognition-aware Human Egocentric Navigationcited by 3
  37. 2026Structured Observation Language for Efficient and Generalizable Vision-Language Navigationcited by 3
  38. 2023Decentralized Social Navigation with Non-Cooperative Robots via Bi-Level Optimizationcited by 2

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