Social robot navigation is an evolving research field that aims to find efficient strategies to safely navigate dynamic environments populated by humans. A critical challenge in this domain is the accurate modeling of human motion, which directly impacts the design and evaluation of navigation algorithms. This article presents a comparative study of two popular categories of human motion models used in social robot navigation, namely velocity-based models and force-based models. A system-theoretic representation of both model types is presented, which highlights their common feedback structure, although with different state variables. Several navigation policies based on reinforcement learning are trained and tested in various simulated environments involving pedestrian crowds modeled with these approaches. A comparative study is conducted to assess performance across multiple factors, including human motion model, navigation policy, scenario complexity and crowd density. The results highlight advantages and challenges of different approaches to modeling human behavior, as well as their role during training and testing of learning-based navigation policies. The findings offer valuable insights and guidelines for selecting appropriate human motion models when designing socially-aware robot navigation systems.

In this brief, the extension of the framework of Learning from Constraints (LfC) to a distributed setting where multiple parties, connected over the network, contribute to the learning process is studied. LfC relies on the generic notion of "constraint" to inject knowledge into the learning problem, and, due to its generality, it deals with possibly nonconvex constraints, enforced either in a hard or soft way. Motivated by recent progresses in the field of distributed and constrained nonconvex optimization, we apply the (distributed) asynchronous method of multipliers (ASYMM) to LfC. The study shows that such a method allows us to support scenarios where selected constraints (i.e., knowledge), data, and outcomes of the learning process can be locally stored in each computational node without being shared with the rest of the network, opening the road to further investigations into privacy-preserving LfC. Constraints act as a bridge between what is shared over the net and what is private to each node, and no central authority is required. We demonstrate the applicability of these ideas in two distributed real-world settings in the context of digit recognition and document classification.

The increasing demand for virtual reality applications in several scientific disciplines feeds new research perspectives dealing with robotics, automation, and computer science. In this context, one of the topics is the design of advanced force-feedback devices allowing not only kinesthetic interaction with virtual objects but also locomotion and navigation inside virtual worlds. This has the main advantage to stimulate human vestibular apparatus, thus increasing the overall realism of simulation. Particularly, this paper deals with mobile haptic interfaces (MHIs), built by combining standard force-feedback devices with mobile platforms. We investigated which factors may affect the transparency of this kind of devices, identifying in mobile robot dynamics a possible cause of loss of transparency. Hence, in this paper, we present a method to analyze dynamic performance of an MHI and some basic guidelines to design controller in order to meet desired specifications. Experimental validation of the theoretical results is reported.

The paper presents the results of experimental tests carried out to validate the performance of a decentralized control law, for the collective circular motion of a team of nonholonomic vehicles. The considered control strategy ensures global asymptotic stability in the single-vehicle case and local asymptotic stability in the multi-vehicle scenario. The main purpose of this work is to verify these theoretical properties in a real-world scenario. As a side contribution, a low-cost experimental setup is presented, based on the LEGO Mindstorms technology. The setup features good scalability, it is versatile enough to be adopted for the evaluation of different control strategies, and it exhibits several issues to be faced in real- world applications.

The problem of simultaneous localization and map building for a team of cooperating robots moving in an unknown environment is addressed. The robots have to estimate the position of distinguishable static landmarks, and then localize themselves with respect to other robots and landmarks, exploiting distance and angle measurements. A novel set theoretic approach to this problem is presented. The proposed localization algorithm provides position estimates and guaranteed uncertainty regions for all robots and landmarks in the environment.