Human-Human & Human-Robot Interaction Transformer (H2INT) for Robot Navigation in Dense and Uncertain Crowds

2026-09-04

AI Summary

本文提出H2INT框架，通过强化学习处理密集人群中机器人导航问题，考虑行人对机器人的不同响应度，提高导航安全性和鲁棒性。

Abstract

Safe robot navigation in dense crowds requires reasoning about pedestrian motion and how it may change in response to a robot. However, many learning-based approaches generate pedestrian motion independently of the robot or assume uniform reciprocity, omitting an important source of interaction uncertainty. This paper presents a Human-Human & Human-Robot Interaction Transformer (H2INT), a reinforcement learning framework that retains robot-conditioned changes in pedestrian motion during policy learning while allowing responsiveness to vary across pedestrians. Responsiveness affects the crowd dynamics when the robot is visible but is not supplied as a policy input; the policy must instead infer its consequences from robot-centered relative positions. A two-stage gated Transformer progressively encodes human-human and human-robot relations, while a recurrent policy captures their temporal evolution. A curriculum gradually reduces pedestrian responsiveness to increase interaction difficulty. Simulation experiments demonstrate improved navigation safety and robustness over representative baselines across response conditions and crowd densities, and show transfer without retraining to structurally distinct crowd-flow layouts. Ablations support the hierarchical relational encoding and gated updates. Real-robot deployment further verifies that the learned policy can operate with sparse observations in a physical environment.

Problem

• Robot Navigation
• Crowd Interaction
• Pedestrian Motion

Innovation

• reinforcement learning
• human-robot interaction
• Transformer
• curriculum learning
• crowd navigation