Robot Crowd Navigation Demo

An interactive toy simulation (Gradio web app) that demonstrates social-force-field navigation for a mobile robot moving toward a goal while avoiding pedestrians. The demo is designed to highlight perception-action coupling in robotics and trade-offs between task performance and human factors metrics.

The simulation renders a short MP4 animation of the robot and pedestrians, and reports summary metrics such as time-to-goal, path length, time spent inside pedestrians’ personal space, smoothness, and collisions.

Source: crowdNavigationSim.py

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Features

• Interactive Gradio UI with sliders for environment + robot parameters
• Animated MP4 playback of each simulation run
• Metrics:
  • Task performance: goal reached, time to goal, path length
  • Human factors: time inside personal space, motion smoothness, collisions

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Quickstart

1) Install dependencies

pip install gradio numpy matplotlib pillow "imageio[ffmpeg]"

2) Run demo

python crowdNavigationSim.py

Gradio will print a local URL (e.g., http://127.0.0.1:7860). Open it in your browser.