  We present an approach for mobile robots to learn to navigate in dynamic
environments with pedestrians via raw depth inputs, in a socially compliant
manner. To achieve this, we adopt a generative adversarial imitation learning
(GAIL) strategy, which improves upon a pre-trained behavior cloning policy. Our
approach overcomes the disadvantages of previous methods, as they heavily
depend on the full knowledge of the location and velocity information of nearby
pedestrians, which not only requires specific sensors, but also the extraction
of such state information from raw sensory input could consume much computation
time. In this paper, our proposed GAIL-based model performs directly on raw
depth inputs and plans in real-time. Experiments show that our GAIL-based
approach greatly improves the safety and efficiency of the behavior of mobile
robots from pure behavior cloning. The real-world deployment also shows that
our method is capable of guiding autonomous vehicles to navigate in a socially
compliant manner directly through raw depth inputs. In addition, we release a
simulation plugin for modeling pedestrian behaviors based on the social force
model.
