Feature-Based Prediction of Trajectories for Socially Compliant Navigation

Mobile robots that operate in a shared environment with humans need the ability to predict the movements of people to better plan their navigation actions. In this paper, we present a novel approach to predict the movements of pedestrians. Our method reasons about entire trajectories that arise from interactions between people in navigation tasks. It applies a maximum entropy learning method based on features that capture relevant aspects of the trajectories to determine the probability distribution that underlies human navigation behavior. Hence, our approach can be used by mobile robots to predict forthcoming interactions with pedestrians and thus react in a socially compliant way. In extensive experiments, we evaluate the capability and accuracy of our approach and demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms the popular social forces method, a state-of-the-art approach. Furthermore, we show how our algorithm can be used for autonomous robot navigation using a real robot.