A Toolkit to Generate Social Navigation Datasets
This addresses the resource-intensive problem of creating datasets for social navigation algorithms in robotics, though it is incremental as it builds on simulation methods.
The paper tackles the lack of social navigation datasets for robots by proposing a simulation-based toolkit to generate such data cost-effectively, and demonstrates its use with a graph neural network application for learned control policies.
Social navigation datasets are necessary to assess social navigation algorithms and train machine learning algorithms. Most of the currently available datasets target pedestrians' movements as a pattern to be replicated by robots. It can be argued that one of the main reasons for this to happen is that compiling datasets where real robots are manually controlled, as they would be expected to behave when moving, is a very resource-intensive task. Another aspect that is often missing in datasets is symbolic information that could be relevant, such as human activities, relationships or interactions. Unfortunately, the available datasets targeting robots and supporting symbolic information are restricted to static scenes. This paper argues that simulation can be used to gather social navigation data in an effective and cost-efficient way and presents a toolkit for this purpose. A use case studying the application of graph neural networks to create learned control policies using supervised learning is presented as an example of how it can be used.