Socially Acceptable Bipedal Navigation: A Signal-Temporal-Logic- Driven Approach for Safe Locomotion

Abstract: Social navigation for bipedal robots remains relatively unexplored due to the highly complex, nonlinear dynamics of bipedal locomotion. This study presents a preliminary exploration of social navigation for bipedal robots in a human crowded environment. We propose a social path planner that ensures the locomotion safety of the bipedal robot while navigating under a social norm. The proposed planner leverages a conditional variational autoencoder architecture and learns from human crowd datasets to produce a socially acceptable path plan. Robot-specific locomotion safety is formally enforced by incorporating signal temporal logic specifications during the learning process. We demonstrate the integration of the social path planner with a model predictive controller and a low-level passivity controller to enable comprehensive full-body joint control of Digit in a dynamic simulation.