CROWD-DRIVEN MAPPING, LOCALIZATION AND SOCIAL-FRIENDLY NAVIGATION SYSTEM

Disclosed are methods of navigating a robot in a crowd involving mapping a local crowd and applying a clustering algorithm that reconstructs a crowd-flow map capturing movement patterns of pedestrians in the local crowd; using a flow-matching metric, localizing the robot in the crowd-flow map; and following a movement pattern in the crowd-flow map using a hierarchical crowd-driven planning on a long time horizon and a short time horizon.