SAGE: A Socially-Aware Generative Engine for Heterogeneous Multi-Agent Navigation
RoboticsMultiagent Systems
Summary
The authors present SAGE, a new method that helps robots navigate safely and politely around people and other robots. They use a special graph structure to understand different types of participants and how they interact. SAGE then predicts future movements and plans robot paths together, making sure the robots avoid collisions and follow social rules. Tests show that SAGE works well in various scenarios, improving safety and social behavior without needing extra training.
Authors
Lan Hu, Minghui Liwang, Wenbo Zhu, Xinlei Yi, Yiguang Hong, Xianbin Wang, Zhenzhen Jiao, Seyyedali Hosseinalipour
Abstract
Safe and socially compliant navigation in open human-robot environments requires robots to reason about heterogeneous participants with different dynamics, autonomy levels, and social roles. Existing trajectory prediction and planning methods often rely on homogeneous interaction assumptions or enforce only geometric collision constraints, making it difficult to jointly model asymmetric interactions, coupled prediction-planning, and soft social norms. This paper proposes SAGE, a socially-aware generative engine for heterogeneous multi-agent navigation. SAGE represents robots and surrounding entities as a directed heterogeneous graph and employs a Heterogeneous Graph Transformer (HGT) to encode type-specific asymmetric interactions. Conditioned on the resulting context, a diffusion-based generative module jointly models future entity trajectories and robot trajectory plans. During inference, a training-free safety-social energy guidance mechanism refines sampled robot trajectories using differentiable collision, kinematic, task-progress, and role-conditioned social-compliance terms. Extensive experiments on real-world (ETH/UCY and SDD) and synthetic datasets verify the effectiveness of SAGE in improving safety and social compliance while maintaining task performance. The proposed guidance mechanism consistently reduces collision and social-violation rates, scales to teams of up to 20 robots, and enables explicit control of the safety-accuracy-task trade-off without retraining. These findings demonstrate the potential of SAGE as a scalable framework for socially-aware multi-agent navigation in complex environments.