Robot Trajectron V2: A Probabilistic Shared Control Framework for Navigation

Abstract: We propose a probabilistic shared-control solution for navigation, called Robot Trajectron V2 (RT-V2), that enables accurate intent prediction and safe, effective assistance in human-robot interaction. RT-V2 jointly models a user's long-term behavioral patterns and their noisy, low-dimensional control signals by combining a prior intent model with a posterior update that accounts for real-time user input and environmental context. The prior captures the multimodal and history-dependent nature of user intent using recurrent neural networks and conditional variational autoencoders, while the posterior integrates this with uncertain user commands to infer desired actions. We conduct extensive experiments to validate RT-V2 across synthetic benchmarks, human-computer interaction studies with keyboard input, and brain-machine interface experiments with non-human primates. Results show that RT-V2 outperforms the state of the art in intent estimation, provides safe and efficient navigation support, and adequately balances user autonomy with assistive intervention. By unifying probabilistic modeling, reinforcement learning, and safe optimization, RT-V2 offers a principled and generalizable approach to shared control for diverse assistive technologies.