Social Robot Navigation through Constrained Optimization: a Comparative Study of Uncertainty-based Objectives and Constraints

This work is dedicated to the study of how uncertainty estimation of the human motion prediction can be embedded into constrained optimization techniques, such as Model Predictive Control (MPC) for the social robot navigation. We propose several cost objectives and constraint functions obtained from the uncertainty of predicting pedestrian positions and related to the probability of the collision that can be applied to the MPC, and all the different variants are compared in challenging scenes with multiple agents. The main question this paper tries to answer is: what are the most important uncertainty-based criteria for social MPC? For that, we evaluate the proposed approaches with several social navigation metrics in an extensive set of scenarios of different complexity in reproducible synthetic environments. The main outcome of our study is a foundation for a practical guide on when and how to use uncertainty-aware approaches for social robot navigation in practice and what are the most effective criteria.

SmartPortraits: Depth Powered Handheld Smartphone Dataset of Human Portraits for State Estimation, Reconstruction and Synthesis

We present a dataset of 1000 video sequences of human portraits recorded in real and uncontrolled conditions by using a handheld smartphone accompanied by an external high-quality depth camera. The collected dataset contains 200 people captured in different poses and locations and its main purpose is to bridge the gap between raw measurements obtained from a smartphone and downstream applications, such as state estimation, 3D reconstruction, view synthesis, etc. The sensors employed in data collection are the smartphone's camera and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), and an external Azure Kinect DK depth camera software synchronized with sub-millisecond precision to the smartphone system. During the recording, the smartphone flash is used to provide a periodic secondary source of lightning. Accurate mask of the foremost person is provided as well as its impact on the camera alignment accuracy. For evaluation purposes, we compare multiple state-of-the-art camera alignment methods by using a Motion Capture system. We provide a smartphone visual-inertial benchmark for portrait capturing, where we report results for multiple methods and motivate further use of the provided trajectories, available in the dataset, in view synthesis and 3D reconstruction tasks.