mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

A Survey on Socially Aware Robot Navigation: Taxonomy and Future Challenges

arXiv 2311.06922 ↗First posted 12 Nov 2023cs.ROcited by 39

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Abstract (arXiv)

Socially aware robot navigation is gaining popularity with the increase in delivery and assistive robots. The research is further fueled by a need for socially aware navigation skills in autonomous vehicles to move safely and appropriately in spaces shared with humans. Although most of these are ground robots, drones are also entering the field. In this paper, we present a literature survey of the works on socially aware robot navigation in the past 10 years. We propose four different faceted taxonomies to navigate the literature and examine the field from four different perspectives. Through the taxonomic review, we discuss the current research directions and the extending scope of applications in various domains. Further, we put forward a list of current research opportunities and present a discussion on possible future challenges that are likely to emerge in the field.

Key facts. Cited by 39 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 12 Nov 2023.

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Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 12; 2025: 14; 2026: 13.

39 papers.

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  1. 2025SocialNav: Training Human-Inspired Foundation Model for Socially-Aware Embodied Navigationcited by 12
  2. 2024From Cognition to Precognition: A Future-Aware Framework for Social Navigationcited by 10
  3. 2024SoNIC: Safe Social Navigation with Adaptive Conformal Inference and Constrained Reinforcement Learningcited by 9
  4. 2024GSON: A Group-based Social Navigation Framework with Large Multimodal Modelcited by 6
  5. 2024Socially Integrated Navigation: A Social Acting Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
  6. 2025ViLAM: Distilling Vision-Language Reasoning into Attention Maps for Social Robot Navigationcited by 5
  7. 2024Arena 4.0: A Comprehensive ROS2 Development and Benchmarking Platform for Human-centric Navigation Using Generative-Model-based Environment Generationcited by 4
  8. 2024Semi-Supervised Unconstrained Head Pose Estimation in the Wildcited by 2
  9. 2025Recent Advances in Multi-Agent Human Trajectory Prediction: A Comprehensive Reviewcited by 2
  10. 2025Socially aware navigation for mobile robots: a survey on deep reinforcement learning approachescited by 2
  11. 2026EvoNav: Evolutionary Reward Function Design for Robot Navigation with Large Language Modelscited by 2
  12. 2024Socially Pertinent Robots in Gerontological Healthcarecited by 1
27 more
  1. 2024Hyp2Nav: Hyperbolic Planning and Curiosity for Crowd Navigationcited by 1
  2. 2025In Search of a Lost Metric: Human Empowerment as a Pillar of Socially Conscious Navigationcited by 1
  3. 2025EmoBipedNav: Emotion-aware Social Navigation for Bipedal Robots with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 1
  4. 2026TRANS: Terrain-aware Reinforcement Learning for Agile Navigation of Quadruped Robots under Social Interactionscited by 1
  5. 2024Guessing human intentions to avoid dangerous situations in caregiving robotscited by 0
  6. 2024Towards Human-Centered Construction Robotics: A Reinforcement Learning-Driven Companion Robot for Contextually Assisting Carpentry Workerscited by 0
  7. 2024RUMOR: Reinforcement learning for Understanding a Model of the Real World for Navigation in Dynamic Environmentscited by 0
  8. 2024Human-Robot Collaborative Minimum Time Search through Sub-priors in Ant Colony Optimizationcited by 0
  9. 2025Observer-Aware Probabilistic Planning Under Partial Observabilitycited by 0
  10. 2025A Comparative Study of Human Motion Models in Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Social Robot Navigationcited by 0
  11. 2025Perspective-Shifted Neuro-Symbolic World Models: A Framework for Socially-Aware Robot Navigationcited by 0
  12. 2025A Lightweight Crowd Model for Robot Social Navigationcited by 0
  13. 2025Learning to Navigate Socially Through Proactive Risk Perceptioncited by 0
  14. 2025A New Trajectory-Oriented Approach to Enhancing Comprehensive Crowd Navigation Performancecited by 0
  15. 2025Stereo4DWalker: Learning 4D-aware Embodied Urban Navigation from Internet Stereo Videoscited by 0
  16. 2025Deep Learning Perspective of Scene Understanding in Autonomous Robotscited by 0
  17. 2026UrbanHuRo: A Two-Layer Human-Robot Collaboration Framework for the Joint Optimization of Heterogeneous Urban Servicescited by 0
  18. 2026Act on What You See: Unlocking Safe Social Navigation in Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 0
  19. 2026Think When It Matters: Conditional VLM Reasoning for Social Navigation with RL Policiescited by 0
  20. 2026UMSS: Towards Unsupervised Multi-modal Semantic Segmentationcited by 0
  21. 2026ACME: A Multi-Cultural, Multi-Embodiment Social-Navigation Datasetcited by 0
  22. 2026Extended Reality as a Mediation Layer for Situated Human Control in Human-Robot Teamingcited by 0
  23. 2026SRL-MPC: Shape-Aware Reinforcement Learned Model Predictive Controlcited by 0
  24. 2026PRISM: Predictive Representation of Interaction Style and Motion for Social Robot Navigationcited by 0
  25. 2026Towards Active Cross-View Object Geo-Localizationcited by 0
  26. 2026SoGuDiff: Socially Guided Diffusion for Steerable, Norm-Grounded Robot Navigationcited by 0
  27. 2026Beyond Leaderboard Scores: A Deployment-Focused Protocol for Interpretable Tracking Evaluation in Pedestrian-Centric Environmentscited by 0