Predictive autonomous robot navigation

This paper considers the problem of a robot navigating in a crowded or congested environment. A robot operating in such an environment can get easily blocked by moving humans and other objects. To deal with this problem it is proposed to attempt to predict the motion trajectory of humans and obstacles. Two kinds of prediction are considered: short-term and long-term. The short-term prediction refers to the one-step ahead prediction and the long-term to the prediction of the final destination point of the obstacle’s movement. The robot movement is controlled by a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). POMDPs are utilized because of their ability to model information about the robot’s location and sensory information in a probabilistic manner. The solution of a POMDP is computationally expensive and thus a hierarchical representation of POMDPs is used.