DR-MPC: Deep Residual Model Predictive Control for Real-world Social Navigation
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Abstract (arXiv)
How can a robot safely navigate around people with complex motion patterns? Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) in simulation holds some promise, but much prior work relies on simulators that fail to capture the nuances of real human motion. Thus, we propose Deep Residual Model Predictive Control (DR-MPC) to enable robots to quickly and safely perform DRL from real-world crowd navigation data. By blending MPC with model-free DRL, DR-MPC overcomes the DRL challenges of large data requirements and unsafe initial behavior. DR-MPC is initialized with MPC-based path tracking, and gradually learns to interact more effectively with humans. To further accelerate learning, a safety component estimates out-of-distribution states to guide the robot away from likely collisions. In simulation, we show that DR-MPC substantially outperforms prior work, including traditional DRL and residual DRL models. Hardware experiments show our approach successfully enables a robot to navigate a variety of crowded situations with few errors using less than 4 hours of training data.
Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 30 of its 43 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 2024.
Builds on
30 of 43 references.
References · 30
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18 more
- 2016Decentralized Non-communicating Multiagent Collision Avoidance with Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 104
- 2019Interactive Gibson Benchmark (iGibson 0.5): A Benchmark for Interactive Navigation in Cluttered Environmentscited by 89
- 2023Principles and Guidelines for Evaluating Social Robot Navigation Algorithmscited by 52
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 3; 2026: 4.
7 papers.
- 2025Towards foundational LiDAR world models with efficient latent flow matchingcited by 10
- 2025Towards Generalizable Safety in Crowd Navigation via Conformal Uncertainty Handlingcited by 5
- 2026From Obstacles to Etiquette: Robot Social Navigation with VLM-Informed Path Selectioncited by 5
- 2025Ratatouille: Imitation Learning Ingredients for Real-world Social Robot Navigationcited by 2
- 2026RAY-TOLD: Ray-Based Latent Dynamics for Dense Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance with TDMPCcited by 0
- 2026Learning-Based Motion Planning for Dynamic Environments: From Foundational Algorithms to Emerging Paradigmscited by 0
- 2026SRL-MPC: Shape-Aware Reinforcement Learned Model Predictive Controlcited by 0
- 2026SRL-MPC: Shape-Aware Reinforcement Learned Model Predictive Control21 Aug 2026
- 2026Learning-Based Motion Planning for Dynamic Environments: From Foundational Algorithms to Emerging Paradigms1 Aug 2026
- 2026RAY-TOLD: Ray-Based Latent Dynamics for Dense Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance with TDMPC30 Apr 2026
- 2026From Obstacles to Etiquette: Robot Social Navigation with VLM-Informed Path Selection9 Feb 2026
- 2025Ratatouille: Imitation Learning Ingredients for Real-world Social Robot Navigation21 Sep 2025
- 2025Towards Generalizable Safety in Crowd Navigation via Conformal Uncertainty Handling7 Aug 2025
- 2025Towards foundational LiDAR world models with efficient latent flow matching30 Jun 2025