A Game-Theoretic Framework for Joint Forecasting and Planning
This addresses safety challenges in human-robot interaction, particularly for autonomous navigation, with an incremental improvement over existing forecasting methods.
The paper tackles the problem of planning safe robot motions around humans by jointly learning forecasts that predict counterfactuals humans guard against, resulting in safer plans demonstrated in a crowd navigation simulator and real-world pedestrian datasets.
Planning safe robot motions in the presence of humans requires reliable forecasts of future human motion. However, simply predicting the most likely motion from prior interactions does not guarantee safety. Such forecasts fail to model the long tail of possible events, which are rarely observed in limited datasets. On the other hand, planning for worst-case motions leads to overtly conservative behavior and a "frozen robot". Instead, we aim to learn forecasts that predict counterfactuals that humans guard against. We propose a novel game-theoretic framework for joint planning and forecasting with the payoff being the performance of the planner against the demonstrator, and present practical algorithms to train models in an end-to-end fashion. We demonstrate that our proposed algorithm results in safer plans in a crowd navigation simulator and real-world datasets of pedestrian motion. We release our code at https://github.com/portal-cornell/Game-Theoretic-Forecasting-Planning.