Learning Interaction-Aware Path Corrections from Unlabeled Trajectories: A LiDAR-Based Sim-to-Real GNN Framework for Construction Robots

Overview & Synopsis

Construction robots operating near workers require navigation that can anticipate human motion while remaining robust to dynamic and unstructured site conditions. However, existing social navigation methods depend on hand-crafted interaction rules, labeled demonstrations, or robot-specific control policies, limiting their scalability and transferability in construction environments. We propose a real-time, LiDAR-only framework that learns interaction-aware path corrections from unlabeled demonstrations. Constant-velocity extrapolation generates residual learning targets, while a GNN models relationships among the robot, pedestrians, and goal context. During deployment, an extended Kalman filter tracks LiDAR detections to construct dynamic graphs, and the GNN offsets planner-generated waypoints through a planner-agnostic interface. Within the bricklaying trial, the GNN reduced path irregularity by 39.2\% and increased minimum TTC. Across Dynablox sequences, it increased minimum TTC by 38.3\% while producing shorter, smoother paths than the baselines. Ablation studies supported a 1.0-s prediction interval and confirmed the benefits of target context, reflection augmentation, and feature normalization.