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The increasing deployment of robots alongside humans necessitates sophisticated communication and motion planning to ensure safety and task achievability in social navigation scenarios. Existing methods often rely heavily on historical data and extensive expert hand-coding, which limits their scalability and generalizability. This paper introduces a novel framework that models social navigation as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), utilizing Conditional Abstraction Trees (CATs) to learn dynamic abstract world representations and policies that focus on critical aspects of interaction. In the offline phase, the framework operates within a simulator, while in the online phase, it deploys the learned representations and policies in real-world scenarios for ongoing refinement and adaptation. Integral to our approach is a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) based human sensor and belief model that accounts for humans’ imperfect perception to enhance the prediction of human motion. We evaluated our method through extensive simulations and user studies involving physical experiments, demonstrating its effectiveness in managing critical interactions and ensuring safety and task completion across various scenarios. 

The increasing deployment of robots in co-working scenarios with humans has revealed complex safety and efficiency challenges in the computation of the robot behavior. Movement among humans is one of the most fundamental —and yet critical—problems in this frontier. While several approaches have addressed this problem from a purely navigational point of view, the absence of a unified paradigm for communicating with humans limits their ability to prevent deadlocks and compute feasible solutions. This paper presents a joint communication and motion planning framework that selects from an arbitrary input set of robot's communication signals while computing robot motion plans. It models a human co-worker's imperfect perception of these communications using a noisy sensor model and facilitates the specification of a variety of social/workplace compliance priorities with a flexible cost function. Theoretical results and simulator-based empirical evaluations show that our approach efficiently computes motion plans and communication strategies that reduce conflicts between agents and resolve potential deadlocks.