Trajectory Learning with Graph Representations for Social Robot Navigation
arXiv:2607.00028v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous mobile robots are expected to exhibit socially compliant navigation for minimizing pedestrian disturbance. While capturing social interactions and incorporating pedestrian motion estimations into decision-making are beneficial for compliance, prior methods fail to address both spatial and temporal characteristics present in real-world data. Reinforcement Learning offers high capability, but it requires hand-crafted reward functions that reduce social behavior to static criteria, limiting its ability to reproduce patterns that exist in real pedestrian behavior. Imitation Learning offers direct training from real-world data but lacks modeling of social interactions and suffers from error accumulation. To this end, we propose an imitation learning framework that leverages spatiotemporal dynamics for socially compliant navigation. To represent social context based on interactions, we introduce a graph-based auxiliary network that e