Belief-Aided-Navigation using Bayesian Neural Networks and Deep Reinforcement Learning for Avoiding Humans in Blind Spots

This repository contains the codes for our paper titled "Belief-Aided-Navigation using Bayesian Neural Networks and Deep Reinforcement Learning for Avoiding Humans in Blind Spots". The original simulation setting and sourcecode come from here. If you want to see the original version, please refer to the link above. For more details, here is arXiv preprint and Youtube.

🔥News

[06.30] Accepted to IROS 2024!

Abstract

Setup

In a conda environment or virtual environment with Python 3.x, install the required python package
```
conda env create -f environment.yaml
```
or
```
pip install -r requirements.txt
```

Install OpenAI Baselines

git clone https://github.com/openai/baselines.git
cd baselines
pip install -e .

Install Python-RVO2 library
Our source code does not work with numpy 1.26.3. Please install version 1.20.3.
```
pip install numpy==1.20.3
```

Overview

This repository is organized in five parts:

crowd_nav/ folder contains configurations and policies used in the simulator.
crowd_sim/ folder contains the simulation environment.
gst_updated/ folder contains the code for running inference of a human trajectory predictor, named Gumbel Social Transformer (GST) [2].
rl/ contains the code for the RL policy networks, wrappers for the prediction network, and ppo algorithm.
trained_models/ contains some pretrained models provided by us.

Note that this repository does not include codes for training a trajectory prediction network. Please refer to from this repo instead.

Run the code

Training

Modify the configurations.
1. PPO and network configurations: modify arguments.py
  - env_name (must be consistent with sim.predict_method in crowd_nav/configs/config.py):
  - If you use the GST predictor, set to CrowdSimPredRealGST-v0.
  - If you use the ground truth predictor or constant velocity predictor, set to CrowdSimPred-v0.
  - If you don't want to use prediction, set to CrowdSimVarNum-v0.
  - use_self_attn: human-human attention network will be included if set to True, else there will be no human-human attention.
  - use_hr_attn: robot-human attention network will be included if set to True, else there will be no robot-human attention.
  - use_bnn: Allows you to select whether or not to use BNN. If not using, change it to false.
  - bnn_policy: Allows you to choose the type of BNN. Options include BNBRL+, BNBRL, BNDNN, none, etc. Please refer to the paper for the characteristics of each neural network.
  - hidden_dim, output_dim: Allows you to set the number of nodes in the middle and output layers of the BNN.
2. You can set the characteristics of BNN in crowd_nav/configs/config.py.
  - robot.belief: Enables or disables belief. If use_bnn == false, then it should be set to false.
  - sim.human_num: Allows you to set the number of people. Note that the number of people in training and testing must be the same.
  - sim.belief_radius: The radius size of belief.
  - robot.FOV: The angle of the blind spot. 1 represents 180 degrees.
  - sim.tracker: Adds a person who continuously tracks the robot's position.
  - robot.blink: Makes the robot unable to obtain information with LiDAR for a certain period of time. The robot.blink_period and robot.blink_time are fixed values and should not be modified.
After you change the configurations, run
```
python train.py
```
The checkpoints and configuration files will be saved to the folder specified by output_dir in arguments.py.

Testing

Please modify the test arguments in line 20-33 of test.py (Don't set the argument values in terminal!), and run

python test.py

Note that the config.py and arguments.py in the testing folder will be loaded, instead of those in the root directory. The testing results are logged in trained_models/your_output_dir/test/ folder, and are also printed on terminal. If you set visualize=True in test.py, you will be able to see visualizations.

Plot the training curves

python plot.py

Simulation

Scenario 1 (No blink, 20 humans)

Scenario 2 (blink for 0.5 sec, 20 humans)

Disclaimer

I only tested my code in Ubuntu with Python 3.9.16 The code may work on other OS or other versions of Python, but I do not have any guarantee.
The performance of my code can vary depending on the choice of hyperparameters and random seeds (see this reddit post). Unfortunately, I do not have time or resources for a thorough hyperparameter search. Thus, if your results are slightly worse than what is claimed in the paper, it is normal. To achieve the best performance, I recommend some manual hyperparameter tuning.

Citation

If you find the code or the paper useful for your research, please cite the following papers:

@inproceedings{kim2024belief,
  title={Belief Aided Navigation using Bayesian Reinforcement Learning for Avoiding Humans in Blind Spots},
  author={Kim, J. and Kwak, D. and Rim, H. and Kim, D.},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the Conference on AI and Robotics},
  year={2024},
  organization={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.10105}
}

Credits

Jinyeob Kim Email : wls2074@khu.ac.kr

Part of the code is based on the following repositories:

[1] J. Kim, S. Kang, S. Yang, B. Kim, J. Yura, and D. Kim, “Transformable Gaussian Reward Function for Socially Aware Navigation Using Deep Reinforcement Learning,” Sensors, vol. 24,no. 14, p. 4540, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.3390/s24144540

[2] P. Chang, N. Chakraborty, and Z. Huang, "Intention Aware Robot Crowd Navigation with Attention-Based Interaction Graph," in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023. (Github: https://github.com/Shuijing725/CrowdNav_Prediction_AttnGraph)

JinnnK / BNBRLplus

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