Navigation & SLAM

Social Navigation

Social navigation is robot navigation among people that goes beyond collision avoidance to respect human social conventions — maintaining comfortable distances, not cutting through groups, signaling intent, and yielding appropriately in corridors and doorways. Approaches range from proxemics-informed cost functions and social force models to learned policies trained on pedestrian datasets and evaluated in benchmarks such as SocNavBench. Human motion prediction is a core subproblem.

Why it matters for physical AI

Robots entering homes, hospitals, and sidewalks are judged on comfort as much as efficiency; socially compliant motion is a prerequisite for acceptance of mobile robots around people.

Build physical AI

Put these concepts to work on real hardware

Axol is a dual-arm robot built for physical AI — teleoperate it, collect demonstrations, and deploy learned policies out of the box.