分解跟随任务,让机器人在人群中既近又安全。
Navigating the Proximity-Safety Balance: Constraint Decomposition for Human Following in Pedestrian Crowds

- 将跟随任务拆分为任务奖励与独立约束,用阈值显式控制
- 在密集人流中实现更优的靠近与避障平衡,减少碰撞和丢失目标
- 适合需灵活调节安全距离的机器人导航场景
在人群环境中跟随目标人类存在保持距离与安全避障的内在矛盾。该矛盾在高密度场景下尤为突出:激进跟随易导致碰撞,过于保守则易丢失目标,尤其当行人行为不可预测时。现有强化学习方法通常将这些目标融合为单一密集奖励,导致远近-安全权衡隐含且难以调节。为此,本文提出在多约束强化学习框架中,将任务分解为稀疏任务奖励与独立成本约束,每个约束通过具有明确行为意义的成本阈值进行管理,而非隐式的奖励权重比例,从而实现对权衡关系的显式、可调控制。进一步量化人类运动预测不确定性,并将其融入强化学习成本,提升在不可预测情境下的安全性。在分布内与分布外场景下的大量实验表明,本方法相较基线能实现更优的远近-安全平衡;真实机器人部署验证了方法在现实场景中的可行性。更多信息见项目页面:https://nav-ps-balance.github.io/。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Following a target human in crowded environments involves an inherent conflict between staying close to the target and navigating safely among surrounding pedestrians and obstacles. This conflict becomes more severe in dense scenarios, where aggressive following risks collisions and conservative margins lead to target loss, especially when pedestrian behaviors are unfamiliar or unpredictable. Existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods typically encode these competing objectives into a single dense reward, but the resulting proximity-safety balance is implicit and difficult to adjust across conditions. To address this, we decompose the human-following task into a sparse task reward and independent cost constraints within a multi-constraint RL formulation, where each constraint is managed through cost thresholds with direct behavioral meaning rather than implicit reward weight ratios, allowing explicit and tunable control over the trade-off. We further quantify the prediction uncertainty of human motions and integrate these estimates into the RL costs to enhance safety under unpredictable conditions. Extensive experiments across both in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings demonstrate that our method achieves an effective proximity-safety balance compared to baselines. Real-robot deployment further validates the feasibility of our method in real-world scenarios. More details are available on our project page: https://nav-ps-balance.github.io/.
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