How can a robot safely navigate around people exhibiting complex motion patterns? Reinforcement Learning (RL) or Deep RL (DRL) in simulation holds some promise, although much prior work relies on simulators that fail to precisely capture the nuances of real human motion. To address this gap, we propose Deep Residual Model Predictive Control (DR-MPC), a method to enable robots to quickly and safely perform DRL from real-world crowd navigation data. By blending MPC with model-free DRL, DR-MPC overcomes the traditional DRL challenges of large data requirements and unsafe initial behavior. DR-MPC…Apple Machine Learning Research