Prediction-based uncertainty estimation for adaptive crowd navigation

Fast, collision-free motion through human environments remains a challenging problem for robotic systems. In these situations, the robot’s ability to reason about its future motion and other agents is often severely limited. By contrast, biological systems routinely make decisions by taking into consideration what might exist in the future based on prior experience. In this paper, we present an approach that provides robotic systems the ability to make future predictions of the environment. We evaluate several deep network architectures, including purely generative and adversarial models for map prediction. We further extend this approach to predict future pedestrian motion. We show that prediction plays a key role in enabling an adaptive, risk-sensitive control policy. Our algorithms are able to generate future maps with a structural similarity index metric up to 0.899 compared to the ground truth map. Further, our adaptive crowd navigation algorithm is able to reduce the number of collisions by 43% in the presence of novel pedestrian motion not seen during training.