# SICNav: Safe and Interactive Crowd Navigation using Model Predictive Control and Bilevel Optimization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10982 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10982/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [SICNav-Diffusion: Safe and Interactive Crowd Navigation with Diffusion Trajectory Predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08858/) (2025)
- [DR-MPC: Deep Residual Model Predictive Control for Real-world Social Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10646/) (2024)
- [Multi-Agent LLM Actor-Critic Framework for Social Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09758/) (2025)
- [Towards Generalizable Safety in Crowd Navigation via Conformal Uncertainty Handling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05634/) (2025)
- [From Obstacles to Etiquette: Robot Social Navigation with VLM-Informed Path Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09002/) (2026)
- [Unifying Large Language Model and Deep Reinforcement Learning for Human-in-Loop Interactive Socially-aware Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15648/) (2024)
- [Residual Neural Terminal Constraint for MPC-based Collision Avoidance in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03428/) (2025)
- [Disentangling Uncertainty for Safe Social Navigation using Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10655/) (2024)
- [CN-CBF: Composite Neural Control Barrier Function for Robot Navigation in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06921/) (2026)
- [Free Energy-Inspired Cognitive Risk Integration for AV Navigation in Pedestrian-Rich Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20850/) (2025)
- [SINRL: Socially Integrated Navigation with Reinforcement Learning using Spiking Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.07266/) (2025)
- [HumanFlow -- Diffusion-Driven MAV Navigation Among Humans via Tightly-Coupled Motion Tracking, Forecasting, and Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.25685/) (2026)
- [JPPD: Joint Prediction_Planning Diffusion with Differentiable Safety Guidance for Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance in Intelligent Transportation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20686/) (2026)
- [SoGuDiff: Socially Guided Diffusion for Steerable, Norm-Grounded Robot Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30560/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robots need to predict and react to human motions to navigate through a crowd without collisions. Many existing methods decouple prediction from planning, which does not account for the interaction between robot and human motions and can lead to the robot getting stuck. We propose SICNav, a Model Predictive Control (MPC) method that jointly solves for robot motion and predicted crowd motion in closed-loop. We model each human in the crowd to be following an Optimal Reciprocal Collision Avoidance (ORCA) scheme and embed that model as a constraint in the robot's local planner, resulting in a bilevel nonlinear MPC optimization problem. We use a KKT-reformulation to cast the bilevel problem as a single level and use a nonlinear solver to optimize. Our MPC method can influence pedestrian motion while explicitly satisfying safety constraints in a single-robot multi-human environment. We analyze the performance of SICNav in two simulation environments and indoor experiments with a real robot to demonstrate safe robot motion that can influence the surrounding humans. We also validate the trajectory forecasting performance of ORCA on a human trajectory dataset.