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arXiv · 2011.09438

EWareNet: Emotion Aware Human Intent Prediction and Adaptive Spatial Profile Fusion for Social Robot Navigation

Venkatraman Narayanan·Bala Murali Manoghar·Rama Prashanth RV·Aniket Bera
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Abstract

We present EWareNet, a novel intent and affect-aware social robot navigation algorithm among pedestrians. Our approach predicts the trajectory-based pedestrian intent from gait sequence, which is then used for intent-guided navigation taking into account social and proxemic constraints. We propose a transformer-based model that works on commodity RGB-D cameras mounted onto a moving robot. Our intent prediction routine is integrated into a mapless navigation scheme and makes no assumptions about the environment of pedestrian motion. Our navigation scheme consists of a novel obstacle profile representation methodology that is dynamically adjusted based on the pedestrian pose, intent, and affect. The navigation scheme is based on a reinforcement learning algorithm that takes pedestrian intent and robot's impact on pedestrian intent into consideration, in addition to the environmental configuration. We outperform current state-of-art algorithms for intent prediction from 3D gaits.

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Venkatraman Narayanan, Bala Murali Manoghar, Rama Prashanth RV, Aniket Bera. 2020-11-18. EWareNet: Emotion Aware Human Intent Prediction and Adaptive Spatial Profile Fusion for Social Robot Navigation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.09438

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