Author name cluster

Sepehr Samavi

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3 papers

2 author rows

AAAI Conference 2026 Conference Paper

SICNav: Safe and Interactive Crowd Navigation Using Model Predictive Control and Bilevel Optimization (Abstract Reprint)

Sepehr Samavi
James R. Han
Florian Shkurti
Angela P. Schoellig

Robots need to predict and react to human motions to navigate through a crowd without collisions. Many existing methods decouple prediction from planning, which does not account for the interaction between robot and human motions and can lead to the robot getting stuck. We propose SICNav, a Model Predictive Control (MPC) method that jointly solves for robot motion and predicted crowd motion in closed-loop. We model each human in the crowd to be following an Optimal Reciprocal Collision Avoidance (ORCA) scheme and embed that model as a constraint in the robot's local planner, resulting in a bilevel nonlinear MPC optimization problem. We use a KKT-reformulation to cast the bilevel problem as a single level and use a nonlinear solver to optimize. Our MPC method can influence pedestrian motion while explicitly satisfying safety constraints in a single-robot multi-human environment. We analyze the performance of SICNav in two simulation environments and indoor experiments with a real robot to demonstrate safe robot motion that can influence the surrounding humans. We also validate the trajectory forecasting performance of ORCA on a human trajectory dataset.

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IROS Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Does Unpredictability Influence Driving Behavior?

Sepehr Samavi
Florian Shkurti
Angela P. Schoellig

In this paper we investigate the effect of the unpredictability of surrounding cars on an ego-car performing a driving maneuver. We use Maximum Entropy Inverse reinforcement Learning to model reward functions for an ego-car conducting a lane change in a highway setting. We define a new feature based on the unpredictability of surrounding cars and use it in the reward function. We learn two reward functions from human data: a baseline and one that incorporates our defined unpredictability feature, then compare their performance with a quantitative and qualitative evaluation. Our evaluation demonstrates that incorporating the unpredictability feature leads to a better fit of human-generated test data. These results encourage further investigation of the effect of unpredictability on driving behavior.

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ICRA Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Building a Winning Self-Driving Car in Six Months

Keenan Burnett
Andreas Schimpe
Sepehr Samavi
Mona Gridseth
Chengzhi Winston Liu
Qiyang Li
Zachary Kroeze
Angela P. Schoellig

The SAE AutoDrive Challenge is a three-year competition to develop a Level 4 autonomous vehicle by 2020. The first set of challenges were held in April of 2018 in Yuma, Arizona. Our team (aUToronto/Zeus) placed first. In this paper, we describe Zeus' complete system architecture and specialized algorithms that enabled us to win. We show that it is possible to develop a vehicle with basic autonomy features in just six months relying on simple, robust algorithms. We do not make use of a prior map. Instead, we have developed a multi-sensor visual localization solution. All the algorithms in the paper run in real-time using CPUs only. We also highlight the closed-loop performance of the system in detail in several experiments.

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