SAP-CoPE: Social-Aware Planning using Cooperative Pose Estimation with Infrastructure Sensor Nodes

This research proposes SAP-CoPE, an indoor navigation framework that integrates cooperative infrastructure sensing, human pose estimation, and a social-aware MPC planner. The framework estimates 3D human poses using uncertainty-aware optimization and sparse LiDAR data, and constructs a personal-space field to generate socially compliant trajectories for autonomous robots. Real-world evaluations demonstrate its effectiveness in navigating human-populated environments.