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

TL;DR

DynoSLAM introduces a probabilistic, socially-aware Graph Neural Network-based SLAM system that effectively models pedestrian dynamics, enhancing real-world social navigation in crowded environments.

Contribution

It integrates stochastic GNN-based pedestrian motion forecasting into SLAM, capturing uncertainty and improving robustness over deterministic methods.

Findings

Maintains high accuracy in retrospective tracking.

Prevents optimization failures caused by deterministic approaches.

Provides a probabilistic safety envelope for navigation.

Abstract

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.