From Crowd Motion Prediction to Robot Navigation in Crowds

We focus on robot navigation in crowded environments. To navigate safely and efficiently within crowds, robots need models for crowd motion prediction. Building such models is hard due to the high dimensionality of multiagent domains and the challenge of collecting or simulating interaction-rich crowd-robot demonstrations. While there has been important progress on models for offline pedestrian motion forecasting, transferring their performance on real robots is nontrivial due to close interaction settings and novelty effects on users. In this paper, we investigate the utility of a recent state-of-the-art motion prediction model (S-GAN) for crowd navigation tasks. We incorporate this model into a model predictive controller (MPC) and deploy it on a self-balancing robot which we subject to a diverse range of crowd behaviors in the lab. We demonstrate that while S-GAN motion prediction accuracy transfers to the real world, its value is not reflected on navigation performance, measured with respect to safety and efficiency; in fact, the MPC performs indistinguishably even when using a simple constant-velocity prediction model, suggesting that substantial model improvements might be needed to yield significant gains for crowd navigation tasks. Footage from our experiments can be found at https://youtu.be/mzFiXg8KsZ0.