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Social navigation is the capability of an autonomous agent, such as a robot, to navigate in a “socially compliant” manner in the presence of other intelligent agents such as humans. With the emergence of autonomously navigating mobile robots in human-populated environments (e.g., domestic service robots in homes and restaurants and food delivery robots on public sidewalks), incorporating socially compliant navigation behaviors on these robots becomes critical to ensuring safe and comfortable human-robot coexistence. To address this challenge, imitation learning is a promising framework, since it is easier for humans to demonstrate the task of social navigation rather than to formulate reward functions that accurately capture the complex multi-objective setting of social navigation. The use of imitation learning and inverse reinforcement learning to social navigation for mobile robots, however, is currently …