Decision-Theoretic Planning with Person Trajectory Prediction for Social Navigation

Robots navigating in a social way should reason about people intentions when acting. For instance, in applications like robot guidance or meeting with a person, the robot has to consider the goals of the people. Intentions are inherently non-observable, and thus we propose Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) as a decision-making tool for these applications. One of the issues with POMDPs is that the prediction models are usually handcrafted. In this paper, we use machine learning techniques to build prediction models from observations. A novel technique is employed to discover points of interest (goals) in the environment, and a variant of Growing Hidden Markov Models (GHMMs) is used to learn the transition probabilities of the POMDP. The approach is applied to an autonomous telepresence robot.