Towards Socially Competent Navigation of Pedestrian Environments

We present a planning framework for producing socially competent robot behaviors in pedestrian environments. The framework is designed according to conclusions of recent psychology studies on action interpretation and sociology studies on human pedestrian behavior. The core of the approach is a novel topological representation of the pedestrian scene, based on braid groups. Thanks to this representation, our online algorithm is able to reason about several topologically distinct scene evolutions, simultaneously predicting future behaviors of other agents and planning the robot?s role in the scene. This is especially important in crowded pedestrian scenes of high uncertainty. Preliminary simulation results demonstrate the potential of our approach for application in real world scenarios.