Causality-enhanced Decision-Making for Autonomous Mobile Robots in Dynamic Environments

The growing integration of robots in shared environments -- such as warehouses, shopping centres, and hospitals -- demands a deep understanding of the underlying dynamics and human behaviours, including how, when, and where individuals engage in various activities and interactions. This knowledge goes beyond simple correlation studies and requires a more comprehensive causal analysis. By leveraging causal inference to model cause-and-effect relationships, we can better anticipate critical environmental factors and enable autonomous robots to plan and execute tasks more effectively. To this end, we propose a novel causality-based decision-making framework that reasons over a learned causal model to predict battery usage and human obstructions, understanding how these factors could influence robot task execution. Such reasoning framework assists the robot in deciding when and how to complete a given task. To achieve this, we developed also PeopleFlow, a new Gazebo-based simulator designed to model context-sensitive human-robot spatial interactions in shared workspaces. PeopleFlow features realistic human and robot trajectories influenced by contextual factors such as time, environment layout, and robot state, and can simulate a large number of agents. While the simulator is general-purpose, in this paper we focus on a warehouse-like environment as a case study, where we conduct an extensive evaluation benchmarking our causal approach against a non-causal baseline. Our findings demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed solutions, highlighting how causal reasoning enables autonomous robots to operate more efficiently and safely in dynamic environments shared with humans.