A New Trajectory-Oriented Approach to Enhancing Comprehensive Crowd Navigation Performance

Abstract: Crowd navigation has garnered considerable research interest in recent years, especially with the proliferating application of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) techniques. Many studies, however, do not sufficiently analyze the relative priorities among evaluation metrics, which compromises the fair assessment of methods with divergent objectives. Furthermore, trajectory-continuity metrics, specifically those requiring $C^2$ smoothness, are rarely incorporated. Current DRL approaches generally prioritize efficiency and proximal comfort, often neglecting trajectory optimization or addressing it only through simplistic, unvalidated smoothness reward. Nevertheless, effective trajectory optimization is essential to ensure naturalness, enhance comfort, and maximize the energy efficiency of any navigation system. To address these gaps, this paper proposes a unified framework that enables the fair and transparent assessment of navigation methods by examining the prioritization and joint evaluation of multiple optimization objectives. We further propose a novel reward-shaping strategy that explicitly emphasizes trajectory-curvature optimization. The resulting trajectory quality and adaptability are significantly enhanced across multi-scale scenarios. Through extensive 2D and 3D experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches.