Crowd-Aware Mobile Robot Navigation Based on Improved Decentralized Structured RNN via Deep Reinforcement Learning

Efficient navigation in a socially compliant manner is an important and challenging task for robots working in dynamic dense crowd environments. With the development of artificial intelligence, deep reinforcement learning techniques have been widely used in the robot navigation. Previous model-free reinforcement learning methods only considered the interactions between robot and humans, not the interactions between humans and humans. To improve this, we propose a decentralized structured RNN network with coarse-grained local maps (LM-SRNN). It is capable of modeling not only Robot–Human interactions through spatio-temporal graphs, but also Human–Human interactions through coarse-grained local maps. Our model captures current crowd interactions and also records past interactions, which enables robots to plan safer paths. Experimental results show that our model is able to navigate efficiently in dense crowd environments, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.