NaviFormer: A Data-Driven Robot Navigation Approach Via Sequence Modeling and Path Planning with Safety Verification

Reinforcement learning has shown great potential in improving the performance of robot navigation. In response to the increasing deployments of mobile robots within various scenarios, a data-driven paradigm of navigation approach with safety verification is preferred where one can train RL algo- rithms with large amounts of prior data, keep learning continu- ously, and ensure safe navigation in applications. Conventional end-to-end reinforcement learning navigation paradigms have encountered multiple challenges in meeting these demands. In this work, we introduce a novel robot navigation approach termed NaviFormer. This approach handles navigation tasks based on sequence modeling to obtain the data-driven ability. It also integrates rule-based verification for safety insurance. We conduct a series of experiments to validate the data-driven ability of our approach and to compare it with existing navi- gation methods. We also perform quantitative tests on a real- world robot platform, TurtleBot. The experimental results show our method’s outstanding data-driven ability and highlight its superior arrival rate and generalization compared to other state-of-the-art methods like the PPO-based navigation method.