# Core Challenges of Social Robot Navigation: A Survey

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.05668 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.05668/

## Key facts

- Cited by 106 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 106)

- [VLN-R1: Vision-Language Navigation via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17221/) (2025)
- [SACSoN: Scalable Autonomous Control for Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01874/) (2023)
- [Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Robot Navigation Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16740/) (2023)
- [TrackVLA: Embodied Visual Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23189/) (2025)
- [VLM-Social-Nav: Socially Aware Robot Navigation through Scoring using Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00210/) (2024)
- [ExACT: Language-guided Conceptual Reasoning and Uncertainty Estimation for Event-based Action Recognition and More](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12534/) (2024)
- [Core Challenges in Embodied Vision-Language Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.13948/) (2021)
- [Learning Model Predictive Controllers with Real-Time Attention for Real-World Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10780/) (2022)
- [Recognition through Reasoning: Reinforcing Image Geo-localization with Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.14674/) (2025)
- [Multi-Agent Dynamic Relational Reasoning for Social Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12275/) (2024)
- [Active Test-Time Adaptation: Theoretical Analyses and An Algorithm](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05094/) (2024)
- [Conflict Avoidance in Social Navigation -- a Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12113/) (2021)
- [EgoNormia: Benchmarking Physical Social Norm Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20490/) (2025)
- [EvolveHypergraph: Group-Aware Dynamic Relational Reasoning for Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.05470/) (2022)
- [From Cognition to Precognition: A Future-Aware Framework for Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13244/) (2024)
- [SpikMamba: When SNN meets Mamba in Event-based Human Action Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16746/) (2024)
- [SocialNav-SUB: Benchmarking VLMs for Scene Understanding in Social Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08757/) (2025)
- [HEIGHT: Heterogeneous Interaction Graph Transformer for Robot Navigation in Crowded and Constrained Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12150/) (2024)
- [SELFI: Autonomous Self-Improvement with Reinforcement Learning for Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00991/) (2024)
- [SOCIALMAPF: Optimal and Efficient Multi-Agent Path Finding with Strategic Agents for Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08390/) (2022)
- [TBD Pedestrian Data Collection: Towards Rich, Portable, and Large-Scale Natural Pedestrian Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17187/) (2023)
- [Uncertainty-Aware DRL for Autonomous Vehicle Crowd Navigation in Shared Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13969/) (2024)
- [GSON: A Group-based Social Navigation Framework with Large Multimodal Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18084/) (2024)
- [Towards Generalizable Safety in Crowd Navigation via Conformal Uncertainty Handling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05634/) (2025)
- [A Cognitive Framework for Delegation Between Error-Prone AI and Human Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02889/) (2022)
- [T2FPV: Dataset and Method for Correcting First-Person View Errors in Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.11294/) (2022)
- [SOCIALGYM 2.0: Simulator for Multi-Agent Social Robot Navigation in Shared Human Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05584/) (2023)
- [Hypergraph-Transformer (HGT) for Interactive Event Prediction in Laparoscopic and Robotic Surgery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01974/) (2024)
- [Socially Integrated Navigation: A Social Acting Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09793/) (2024)
- [ViLAM: Distilling Vision-Language Reasoning into Attention Maps for Social Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09820/) (2025)

## 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.