Hello. My name is Allan Wang. I am a postdoc researcher at the Miraikan Accessibility Lab in Tokyo, Japan, and am advised by Chieko Asakawa. I obtained my PhD at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University in December 2023. During my PhD, I was a member of the TBD lab advised by Aaron Steinfeld.
My research area falls under intersections of Robotics, Perception, Human-Robot Interaction, and Machine Learning. I am interested in solving the social navigation problem. I.e. How can a robot navigate efficiently and safely around humans while conforming to the various social rules in pedestrian-rich environments? To this end, I have developed various models and tools to help push the research boundary in this area.
News
- 04/2024 – Our team’s AI suitcase robot has begun daily operations at Miraikan! I believe this is the first-ever permanent employment of a guide robot in a museum. If you stop by Tokyo, feel free to come and check it out.
- 04/2024 – I started my postdoc position at Miraikan Accessinbility Lab.
- 02/2024 – We will organize the “Unsolved Problems in Social Navigation” workshop at RSS2024. If you are interested, please consider submitting a short paper!
- 01/2024 – Our paper on the full-scale TBD Pedestrian Dataset is accepted at ICRA2024. It’s a great dataset, please check it out.
- 12/2023 – I defended my thesis “Social Navigation with Pedestrian Groups”.
- 10/2023 – We organized the “2nd Workshop on Social Robot Navigation: Advances and Evaluation” workshop at iROS2023.
Tools & Datasets
TBD Pedestrian Dataset
A data collection effort with the ultimate goal of producing an in-the-wild dataset that offers a combination of top-down views and ego-centric views, human-verified labels grounded in the metric space and capturing of naturalistic pedestrian behavior around a “robot”. Additionally, we aim to create a scalable collection effort so that large quantities of data can be collected and labeled quickly.
The second set of our dataset has been released! [website][paper]
The label correction tool. [code]
SocNavBench
A tool for benchmarking robot planning algorithms against various episodes of multi-agent environments. It features a suite of metrics measuring various aspects of social navigation (efficiency, safety, legibility, etc.) and the agent movements are based on real-world datasets. [website/code][paper]
Publication
Memory-Maze: Scenario-Driven Benchmark and Visual Language
Navigation Model for Guiding Blind People [paper]
Masaki Kuribayashi*, Kohei Uehara∗, Allan Wang, Daisuke Sato, Simon Chu, Shigeo Morishima
(Under review)
TBD Pedestrian Data Collection: Towards Rich, Portable, and Large-Scale Natural Pedestrian Data [paper][website][code][presentation]
Allan Wang, Daisuke Sato, Yasser Corzo, Sonya Simkin, Abhijat Biswas, Aaron Steinfeld
2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Social Navigation with Pedestrian Groups [thesis]
Allan Wang
2023 PhD Thesis – Carnegie Mellon University
Core Challenges of Social Robot Navigation: A Survey [paper]
Christoforos Mavrogiannis, Francesca Baldini, Allan Wang, Dapeng Zhao, Pete Trautman, Aaron Steinfeld, Jean Oh
2022 ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI)
Group-based Motion Prediction for Navigation in Crowded Environments (Oral 6.5%) [paper] [presentation] [code]
Allan Wang, Christoforos Mavrogiannis, Aaron Steinfeld
2021 the 5th Conference on Robot Learning
SocNavBench: A Grounded Simulation Testing Framework for Evaluating Social Navigation [paper]
Abhijat Biswas, Allan Wang, Gustavo Silvera, Aaron Steinfeld, Henny Admoni
2021 ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction (THRI)
Group Split and Merge Prediction With 3D Convolutional Networks [paper][presentation]
Allan Wang, Aaron Steinfeld
2020 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Deep visual perception for dynamic walking on discrete terrain [paper]
Avinash Siravuru, Allan Wang, Quan Nguyen, Koushil Sreenath
2017 IEEE-RAS 17th International Conference on Humanoid Robotics (Humanoids)
Robotic assistance in indoor navigation for people who are blind [paper]
Aditi Kulkarni, Allan Wang, Lynn Urbina, Aaron Steinfeld, Bernardine Dias
2016 (Late-Breaking Report) 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
Contact
Email: allan.wang@jst.go.jp
My Business Card: [Image]
Allan Wang 