Towards Socially Compliant Navigation in Deep Reinforcement Learning via Proxemics-Based Reward Modeling

Developing effective robot navigation methods in crowded environments is essential for real-world applications. Although recent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods have improved navigation performance in crowded environments, they often focus primarily on task-centric objectives and underrepresent social compliance objectives. In this paper, we introduce a novel proxemics-based reward formulation for DRL social navigation that provides a dense, interpretable social learning signal while maintaining navigation efficiency. Our approach models each human's personal space as a radial Gaussian-mixture field derived from Hall's proxemics theory and computes a robot-centric local cost over the robot's field of view. We integrate the proposed reward into established DRL navigation methods and evaluate it in simulation across multiple crowd scenarios, reward baselines, and crowd densities using both navigation metrics and social metrics. Results show that the proposed reward consistently improves social metrics in simulation while maintaining competitive navigation performance relative to the compared reward models.

ACME: A Multi-Cultural, Multi-Embodiment Social-Navigation Dataset

Understanding how robots and humans move in shared spaces is essential for designing effective social robot navigation policies and predicting human behavior. However, existing datasets often lack the diversity needed to capture differences in culture, geography, and human-robot interaction-factors that strongly shape appropriate social behavior. To address this gap, we introduce ACME: A Cross-cultural, Multi-Embodiment dataset for social navigation. A large-scale data collection effort across 8 sites in 5 countries, using 7 robot embodiments, ACME is a large and diverse multi-modal dataset aimed at advancing social navigation research, providing 29.35 hours of onboard robot data and 43.5 hours of overhead pedestrian tracking data. Unlike prior datasets, it focuses on capturing goal-driven social navigation behavior in complex social scenarios with explicit robot-crowd interaction through robot speech. To facilitate learning navigation policies and predicting pedestrian trajectories, ACME provides 3D and 2D scene features, odometry, interaction information, and human-annotated pedestrian trajectory labels. We make ACME easy to use by providing both human-readable data for each sensor modality as well as raw binary data. Our qualitative and quantitative analyses show that our dataset captures more challenging scenarios and a broader distribution of pedestrian behavior than previous datasets.

Think When It Matters: Conditional VLM Reasoning for Social Navigation with RL Policies

As mobile robots become more integrated into everyday human environments, social robot navigation is becoming essential for ensuring human comfort, safety, and trust. While reinforcement learning (RL) navigation policies provide the fast inference and reactive behavior necessary for real-time deployment, they still lack flexible semantic reasoning capabilities and often fail to generalize to complex social scenarios. Recent approaches have increasingly turned to vision-language models (VLMs) in place of RL policies to improve semantic and social reasoning in robot navigation. Nevertheless, their high computational cost and slow inference remain major barriers to real-time deployment. To overcome these limitations, we introduce HUMA (Hybrid Understanding for Multi-modal social Navigation), a hybrid architecture that dynamically balances the computational efficiency of RL policies with the deep semantic understanding of VLMs. Our approach uses a reactive RL policy to handle low-density, routine navigation tasks, while conditioning it on a post-trained high-level VLM when a human enters sensitive situations, such as the robot's proximity zone. We evaluate HUMA on the Social-MP3D and Social-HM3D benchmarks, where it achieves task success improvements of 20% and 3%, respectively, while significantly reducing personal space violations and human collisions against state-of-the-art baselines. Extensive ablation studies validate each architectural component, and real-world deployment on the Mirokaï mobile robot further demonstrates the practical viability of our approach.

HumAIN: Human-Aware Implicit Social Robot Navigation

Effective social robot navigation requires sensitivity to human behavior, often revealed through subtle skeletal cues like gait and orientation. We present Human-Aware Implicit Social Robot Navigation (HumAIN), a novel framework that fuses implicit social cues directly into the planning loop via knowledge distillation. We first employ a transformer-based teacher model that fuses rich multi-modal inputs, including historic images, skeletal keypoints, robot state, and a robot's target goal, to learn robust, human-aware representations for the robot's future trajectory planning. To enable real-time deployment, we then distill this knowledge into a lightweight student model. By optimizing for both trajectory reconstruction and latent feature alignment with the teacher, the student learns to infer complex social dynamics from minimal inputs. Bridging the prediction-planning gap with an efficient distilled architecture, our method enables robots to reason about human behavior in a manner that is adaptive, robust, and socially compliant. We validate HumAIN through extensive experiments, where it improves trajectory prediction metrics by an average of 29.8% across all metrics compared to state-of-the-art baselines. These results highlight the benefit of using implicit, whole-body cues to achieve human-like navigation awareness on resource-constrained platforms.

DynoSLAM: Dynamic SLAM with Generative Graph Neural Networks for Real-World Social Navigation

Traditional Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms rely heavily on the static environment assumption, which severely limits their applicability in real-world spaces populated by moving entities, such as pedestrians. In this work, we propose DynoSLAM, a tightly-coupled Dynamic GraphSLAM architecture that integrates socially-aware Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) directly into the factor graph optimization. Unlike conventional approaches that use rigid constant-velocity heuristics or deterministic single-agent neural priors, our framework formulates pedestrian motion forecasting as a stochastic World Model. By utilizing Monte Carlo rollouts from a trained GNN, we capture the multimodal epistemic uncertainty of human interactions and embed it into the SLAM graph via a dynamic Mahalanobis distance factor. We demonstrate through extensive simulated experiments that this stochastic formulation not only maintains highly accurate retrospective tracking but also prevents the optimization failures caused by the deterministic "argmax problem". Ultimately, extracting the empirical mean and covariance matrices of future pedestrian states provides a mathematically rigorous, probabilistic safety envelope for downstream local planners, enabling anticipatory and collision-free robot navigation in densely crowded environments.