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Abstract-The goal of this research is to enable mobile robots to navigate through crowded environments such as indoor shopping malls, airports, or downtown side walks. The key research question addressed in this paper is how to learn planners that generate human-like motion behavior. Our approach uses inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to learn human-like navigation behavior based on example paths. Since robots have only limited sensing, we extend existing IRL methods to the case of partially observable environments. We demonstrate the capabilities of our approach using a realistic crowd flow simulator in which we modeled multiple scenarios in crowded environments. We show that our planner learned to guide the robot along the flow of people when the environment is crowded, and along the shortest path if no people are around.

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Stable chromium, molybdenum, tungsten, manganese, rhenium, ruthenium, osmium, cobalt, rhodium, and iridium metal nanoparticles (M-NPs) have been reproducibly obtained by facile, rapid (3 min), and energy-saving 10 W microwave irradiation (MWI) under an argon atmosphere from their metal-carbonyl precursors [M(x)(CO)(y)] in the ionic liquid (IL) 1-butyl-3-methylimidazolium tetrafluoroborate ([BMIm][BF(4)]). This MWI synthesis is compared to UV-photolytic (1000 W, 15 min) or conventional thermal decomposition (180-250 degrees C, 6-12 h) of [M(x)(CO)(y)] in ILs. The MWI-obtained nanoparticles have a very small (<5 nm) and uniform size and are prepared without any additional stabilizers or capping molecules as long-term stable M-NP/IL dispersions (characterization by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), transmission electron diffraction (TED), and dynamic light scattering (DLS)). The ruthenium, rhodium, or iridium nanoparticle/IL dispersions are highly active and easily recyclable catalysts for the biphasic liquid-liquid hydrogenation of cyclohexene to cyclohexane with activities of up to 522 (mol product) (mol Ru)(-1) h(-1) and 884 (mol product) (mol Rh)(-1) h(-1) and give almost quantitative conversion within 2 h at 10 bar H(2) and 90 degrees C. Catalyst poisoning experiments with CS(2) (0.05 equiv per Ru) suggest a heterogeneous surface catalysis of Ru-NPs.