Tactile Aware Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance in Crowded Environment with Deep Reinforcement Learning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a tactile sensor array combined with deep reinforcement learning to enable mobile robots to navigate safely and efficiently in crowded environments by sensing contact and making risk-aware movements.

Contribution

It presents a novel tactile sensing layer integrated with LiDAR and a reinforcement learning-based local path planner for dynamic obstacle avoidance.

Findings

Successful navigation in crowded environments

Enhanced safety and social compliance

Robustness to near-contact obstacle interactions

Abstract

Mobile robots operating in crowded environments require the ability to navigate among humans and surrounding obstacles efficiently while adhering to safety standards and socially compliant mannerisms. This scale of the robot navigation problem may be classified as both a local path planning and trajectory optimization problem. This work presents an array of force sensors that act as a tactile layer to complement the use of a LiDAR for the purpose of inducing awareness of contact with any surrounding objects within immediate vicinity of a mobile robot undetected by LiDARs. By incorporating the tactile layer, the robot can take more risks in its movements and possibly go right up to an obstacle or wall, and gently squeeze past it. In addition, we built up a simulation platform via Pybullet which integrates Robot Operating System (ROS) and reinforcement learning (RL) together. A touch-aware neural network model was trained on it to create an RL-based local path planner for dynamic obstacle avoidance. Our proposed method was demonstrated successfully on an omni-directional mobile robot who was able to navigate in a crowded environment with high agility and versatility in movement, while not being overly sensitive to nearby obstacles-not-in-contact.