Human-Robot Cooperative Distribution Coupling for Hamiltonian-Constrained Social Navigation

Navigating in human-filled public spaces is a critical challenge for deploying autonomous robots in real-world environments. This paper introduces NaviDIFF, a novel Hamiltonian-constrained socially-aware navigation framework designed to address the complexities of human-robot interaction and socially-aware path planning. NaviDIFF integrates a port-Hamiltonian framework to model dynamic physical interactions and a diffusion model to manage uncertainty in human-robot cooperation. The framework leverages a spatial-temporal transformer to capture social and temporal dependencies, enabling more accurate spatial-temporal environmental dynamics understanding and port-Hamiltonian physical interactive process construction. Additionally, reinforcement learning from human feedback is employed to fine-tune robot policies, ensuring adaptation to human preferences and social norms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NaviDIFF outperforms state-of-the-art methods in social navigation tasks, offering improved stability, efficiency, and adaptability.

@article{wang2025_2409.13573,
  title={ Human-Robot Cooperative Distribution Coupling for Hamiltonian-Constrained Social Navigation },
  author={ Weizheng Wang and Chao Yu and Yu Wang and Byung-Cheol Min },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.13573},
  year={ 2025 }
}