Human-Human & Human-Robot Interaction Transformer (H2INT) for Robot Navigation in Dense and Uncertain Crowds

Engineering notes

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

Safe robot navigation in dense crowds requires reasoning about pedestrian motion and how it may change in response to a robot. However, many learning-based approaches generate pedestrian motion independently of the robot or assume uniform reciprocity, omitting an important source of interaction uncertainty. This paper presents a Human-Human & Human-Robot Interaction Transformer (H2INT), a reinforcement learning framework that retains robot-conditioned changes in pedestrian motion during policy learning while allowing responsiveness to vary across pedestrians. Responsiveness affects the crowd dynamics when the robot is visible but is not supplied as a policy input; the policy must instead infer its consequences from robot-centered relative positions. A two-stage gated Transformer progressively encodes human-human and human-robot relations, while a recurrent policy captures their temporal evolution. A curriculum gradually reduces pedestrian responsiveness to increase interaction difficulty. Simulation experiments demonstrate improved navigation safety and robustness over representative baselines across response conditions and crowd densities, and show transfer without retraining to structurally distinct crowd-flow layouts. Ablations support the hierarchical relational encoding and gated updates. Real-robot deployment further verifies that the learned policy can operate with sparse observations in a physical environment.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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