Learning Side-by-Side Navigation for Personal Mobility Vehicles from Human Drivers

This paper presents an approach to achieve side-by-side autonomous motion with a pair of personal mobility vehicles (PMVs). Given a global path, two PMVs plan cooperatively so as to hold a social formation that lets the passengers hold a conversation, while keeping the ride safe and smooth. Each vehicle runs its own sampling-based model-predictive planner; the planners exchange nothing but the odometry each vehicle could observe of the other, and the joint decision is expressed as a pair of utility matrices over pairs of candidate trajectories, resolved by a common rule. The behavioural parameters are fitted by inverse reinforcement learning from 409 minutes of driving by ten pairs of people in human-driven PMVs in an indoor environment, and the lanes the pair can use are derived offline from the corridor itself rather than fixed by hand. A safety layer the cost cannot override executes a move only if the vehicle can still brake clear, measured from its whole body, and a vehicle that is stuck reverses along its own path and continues. In closed-loop simulation over 24 runs in the conditions the drivers were recorded in and 24 in four generated obstacle layouts, no vehicle entered a wall or a cone. The pair holds conversational formation for 60.5 and 68.9 percent of the time among obstacles (anticlockwise and clockwise) and 81.2 and 91.5 percent in a clear aisle, against the drivers' 34.0 and 36.0 percent, and 52.9 and 56.0 percent, and it matches their speed. It keeps one lateral formation where the drivers alternated between a close diagonal and a wide abreast one, and it varies far less. Experimental results are based on a differential drive kinematic simulator running on ROS 2.