COLSON: Controllable Learning-Based Social Navigation via Diffusion-Based Reinforcement Learning

Mobile robot navigation in dynamic environments with pedestrian traffic is a key challenge in the development of autonomous mobile service robots. Recently, deep reinforcement learning-based methods have been actively studied and have outperformed traditional rule-based approaches owing to their optimization capabilities. Among these methods, those that assume continuous action spaces typically rely on Gaussian distributions, which limit the flexibility of the generated actions. In contrast, the application of diffusion models to reinforcement learning has advanced, enabling more flexible action distributions than Gaussian policy-based approaches. In this study, we apply a diffusion-based reinforcement learning approach to social navigation and validate its effectiveness. Furthermore, by exploiting the characteristics of diffusion models, we propose extensions that enable adaptation to previously unseen scenarios without additional training. As concrete scenario examples, we demonstrate adaptability to scenarios in which static obstacles exist in the environment that were not present during training, as well as scenarios in which the objective differs from training, such as accompanying target pedestrians while avoiding others to reach the destination.