Robot Navigation Based on Human Trajectory Prediction and Multiple Travel Modes

For a mobile robot, navigation skills that are safe, efficient, and socially compliant in crowded, dynamic environments are essential. This is a particularly challenging problem as it requires the robot to accurately predict pedestrians’ movements, analyse developing traffic situations, and plan its own path or trajectory accordingly. Previous approaches still exhibit low accuracy for pedestrian trajectory prediction, and they are prone to generate infeasible trajectories under complex crowded conditions. In this paper, we develop an improved socially conscious model to learn and predict a pedestrian’s future trajectory. To generate more efficient and safer trajectories in a changing crowed space, an online path planning algorithm considering pedestrians’ predicted movements and the feasibility of the candidate trajectories is proposed. Then, multiple traffic states are defined to guide the robot finding the optimal navigation strategies under changing traffic situations in a crowded area. We have demonstrated the performance of our approach outperforms state-of-the-art approaches with public datasets, in low-density and simulated medium-density crowded scenarios.