Socially aware navigation for mobile robots: a survey on deep reinforcement learning approaches

Socially aware navigation is a fast-evolving research area in robotics that enables robots to move within human environments while adhering to the implicit human social norms. The advent of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has accelerated the development of navigation policies that enable robots to incorporate these social conventions while effectively reaching their objectives. This survey offers a comprehensive overview of DRL-based approaches to socially aware navigation, highlighting key aspects such as proxemics, human comfort, naturalness, trajectory and intention prediction, which enhance robot interaction in human environments. This work critically analyzes the integration of value-based, policy-based, and actor-critic reinforcement learning algorithms alongside neural network architectures, such as feedforward, recurrent, convolutional, graph, and transformer networks, for enhancing agent learning and representation in socially aware navigation. Furthermore, we examine crucial evaluation mechanisms, including metrics, benchmark datasets, simulation environments, and the persistent challenges of sim-to-real transfer. Our comparative analysis of the literature reveals that while DRL significantly improves safety, and human acceptance over traditional approaches, the field still faces setback due to non-uniform evaluation mechanisms, absence of standardized social metrics, computational burdens that limit scalability, and difficulty in transferring simulation to real robotic hardware applications. We assert that future progress will depend on hybrid approaches that leverage the strengths of multiple approaches and producing benchmarks that balance technical efficiency with human-centered evaluation. By reviewing the state of the art and highlighting these challenges, this work provides researchers and practitioners with a roadmap for advancing DRL-based socially aware navigation toward robust, real-world deployment.