This work studies the problem of object goal navigation which involves navigating to an instance of the given object category in unseen environments. End-to-end learning-based navigation methods struggle at this task as they are ineffective at exploration and long-term planning. We propose a modular system called, `Goal-Oriented Semantic Exploration' which builds an episodic semantic map and uses it to explore the environment efficiently based on the goal object category. Empirical results in visually realistic simulation environments show that the proposed model outperforms a wide range of baselines including end-to-end learning-based methods as well as modular map-based methods and led to the winning entry of the CVPR-2020 Habitat ObjectNav Challenge. Ablation analysis indicates that the proposed model learns semantic priors of the relative arrangement of objects in a scene, and uses them to explore efficiently. Domain-agnostic module design allow us to transfer our model to a mobile robot platform and achieve similar performance for object goal navigation in the real-world.
AERR-Nav: Adaptive Exploration-Recovery-Reminiscing Strategy for Zero-Shot Object Navigation
Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；Institute of automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；The University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）
We consider the problems of exploration and point-goal navigation in previously unseen environments, where the spatial complexity of indoor scenes and partial observability constitute these tasks challenging. We argue that learning occupancy priors over indoor maps provides significant advantages towards addressing these problems. To this end, we present a novel planning framework that first learns to generate occupancy maps beyond the field-of-view of the agent, and second leverages the model uncertainty over the generated areas to formulate path selection policies for each task of interest. …
TONAV: Task-Oriented Navigation and Action-Velocity Chunk Learning for Articulated Object Quadrupedal Mobile Manipulation
School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University（湖南大学人工智能与机器人学院）；National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University（湖南大学机器人视觉感知与控制技术国家工程研究中心）；College of Semiconductors (College of Integrated Circuits), Hunan University（湖南大学半导体学院（集成电路学院））
When searching for an object humans navigate through a scene using semantic information and spatial relationships. We look for an object using our knowledge of its attributes and relationships with other objects to infer the probable location. In this paper, we propose to tackle the visual navigation problem using rich semantic representations of the observed scene and object-oriented targets to train an agent. We show that both allows the agent to generalize to new targets and unseen scene in a short amount of training time.
Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg（阿尔伯特-路德维希-弗莱堡大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
This paper investigates exploration strategies of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) methods to learn navigation policies for mobile robots. In particular, we augment the normal external reward for training DRL algorithms with intrinsic reward signals measured by curiosity. We test our approach in a mapless navigation setting, where the autonomous agent is required to navigate without the occupancy map of the environment, to targets whose relative locations can be easily acquired through low-cost solutions (e.g., visible light localization, Wi-Fi signal localization). We validate that the intri…
Learning Goal-Oriented Vision-and-Language Navigation with Self-Improving Demonstrations at Scale
Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；UNC Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）；Shanghai Jiaotong University（上海交通大学）
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook 人工智能研究院）
State-of-the-art navigation methods leverage a spatial memory to generalize to new environments, but their occupancy maps are limited to capturing the geometric structures directly observed by the agent. We propose occupancy anticipation, where the agent uses its egocentric RGB-D observations to infer the occupancy state beyond the visible regions. In doing so, the agent builds its spatial awareness more rapidly, which facilitates efficient exploration and navigation in 3D environments. By exploiting context in both the egocentric views and top-down maps our model successfully anticipates a br…
Lookahead Exploration with Neural Radiance Representation for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation
Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Wisconsin（威斯康星大学）；Indiana University（印第安纳大学）
School of Computer Science, Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学计算机学院）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Inception Institute of Artificial Intelligence（起源人工智能研究院）
Vision-language navigation (VLN) is the task of entailing an agent to carry out navigational instructions inside photo-realistic environments. One of the key challenges in VLN is how to conduct a robust navigation by mitigating the uncertainty caused by ambiguous instructions and insufficient observation of the environment. Agents trained by current approaches typically suffer from this and would consequently struggle to avoid random and inefficient actions at every step. In contrast, when humans face such a challenge, they can still maintain robust navigation by actively exploring the surroun…
3D-Aware Object Goal Navigation via Simultaneous Exploration and Identification
Peking University（北京大学）；Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence（北京人工智能研究院）；Tongji University（同济大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学）
Collaborative Navigation and Exploration with $β$-Sparse Gaussian Processes
D. Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, GA, USA（佐治亚理工学院D.Guggenheim航空航天工程学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, UNC Charlotte, Charlotte, NC, USA（北卡罗来纳大学夏洛特分校电气与计算机工程系）
In this work we showcase the design and assessment of the performance of a multi-camera UAV, when coupled with state-of-the-art planning and mapping algorithms for autonomous navigation. The system leverages state-of-the-art receding horizon exploration techniques for Next-Best-View (NBV) planning with 3D and semantic information, provided by a reconfigurable multi stereo camera system. We employ our approaches in an autonomous drone-based inspection task and evaluate them in an autonomous exploration and mapping scenario. We discuss the advantages and limitations of using multi stereo camera …
Data privacy is a central problem for embodied agents that can perceive the environment, communicate with humans, and act in the real world. While helping humans complete tasks, the agent may observe and process sensitive information of users, such as house environments, human activities, etc. In this work, we introduce privacy-preserving embodied agent learning for the task of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN), where an embodied agent navigates house environments by following natural language instructions. We view each house environment as a local client, which shares nothing other than lo…
This study presents a new methodology for learning-based motion planning for autonomous exploration using aerial robots. Through the reinforcement learning method of learning through trial and error, the action policy is derived that can guide autonomous exploration of underground and tunnel environments. A new Markov decision process state is designed to learn the robot's action policy by using simulation only, and the results are applied to the real-world environment without further learning. Reduce the need for the precision map in grid-based path planner and achieve map-less navigation. Th…
The Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions（约翰斯·霍普金斯医疗机构）
Clinical examinations that involve endoscopic exploration of the nasal cavity and sinuses often do not have a reference image to provide structural context to the clinician. In this paper, we present a system for navigation during clinical endoscopic exploration in the absence of computed tomography (CT) scans by making use of shape statistics from past CT scans. Using a deformable registration algorithm along with dense reconstructions from video, we show that we are able to achieve submillimeter registrations in in-vivo clinical data and are able to assign confidence to these registrations u…
With the rapidly growing expansion in the use of UAVs, the ability to autonomously navigate in varying environments and weather conditions remains a highly desirable but as-of-yet unsolved challenge. In this work, we use Deep Reinforcement Learning to continuously improve the learning and understanding of a UAV agent while exploring a partially observable environment, which simulates the challenges faced in a real-life scenario. Our innovative approach uses a double state-input strategy that combines the acquired knowledge from the raw image and a map containing positional information. This po…
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a task to guide an embodied agent moving to a target position using language instructions. Despite the significant performance improvement, the wide use of fine-grained instructions fails to characterize more practical linguistic variations in reality. To fill in this gap, we introduce a new setting, namely Underspecified vision-and-Language Navigation (ULN), and associated evaluation datasets. ULN evaluates agents using multi-level underspecified instructions instead of purely fine-grained or coarse-grained, which is a more realistic and general setting…
Spatial-VLN: Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation With Explicit Spatial Perception and Exploration
Robotics and Control Laboratory, School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, and the State Key Laboratory of Turbulence and Complex Systems, Peking University（机器人与控制实验室、先进制造与机器人学院，以及湍流与复杂系统国家重点实验室，北京大学）；Defense Innovation Institute, Academy of Military Sciences, Beijing（国防科技创新研究院，军事科学院，北京）；Tianjin Artificial Intelligence Innovation Center, Tianjin（天津人工智能创新中心，天津）；Institute of Computing and Intelligence, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen)（计算与智能学院，哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））
This work tackles scene understanding for outdoor robotic navigation, solely relying on images captured by an on-board camera. Conventional visual scene understanding interprets the environment based on specific descriptive categories. However, such a representation is not directly interpretable for decision-making and constrains robot operation to a specific domain. Thus, we propose to segment egocentric images directly in terms of how a robot can navigate in them, and tailor the learning problem to an autonomous navigation task. Building around an image segmentation network, we present a gen…
Technische Universität München（慕尼黑工业大学）；Oculus Research（奥库鲁斯研究院）；RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）
Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) are strongly limited in their payload and power capacity. In order to implement autonomous navigation, algorithms are therefore desirable that use sensory equipment that is as small, low-weight, and low-power consuming as possible. In this paper, we propose a method for autonomous MAV navigation and exploration using a low-cost consumer-grade quadrocopter equipped with a monocular camera. Our vision-based navigation system builds on LSD-SLAM which estimates the MAV trajectory and a semi-dense reconstruction of the environment in real-time. Since LSD-SLAM only deter…
MUSON: A Reasoning-oriented Multimodal Dataset for Socially Compliant Navigation in Urban Environments
Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, Hokkaido University（北海道大学信息科学研究生院）；Graduate School of Computer Science, George Mason University（乔治·马歇尔大学计算机科学研究生院）
Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）
Vision-language navigation (VLN) is a challenging task due to its large searching space in the environment. To address this problem, previous works have proposed some methods of fine-tuning a large model that pretrained on large-scale datasets. However, the conventional fine-tuning methods require extra human-labeled navigation data and lack self-exploration capabilities in environments, which hinders their generalization of unseen scenes. To improve the ability of fast cross-domain adaptation, we propose Prompt-based Environmental Self-exploration (ProbES), which can self-explore the environm…
Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Zhijiang Laboratory（之江实验室）
The ability to navigate like a human towards a language-guided target from anywhere in a 3D embodied environment is one of the 'holy grail' goals of intelligent robots. Most visual navigation benchmarks, however, focus on navigating toward a target from a fixed starting point, guided by an elaborate set of instructions that depicts step-by-step. This approach deviates from real-world problems in which human-only describes what the object and its surrounding look like and asks the robot to start navigation from anywhere. Accordingly, in this paper, we introduce a Scenario Oriented Object Naviga…
GUI Exploration Lab: Enhancing Screen Navigation in Agents via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；StepFun；Waseda University（早稻田大学）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）
LuSNAR:A Lunar Segmentation, Navigation and Reconstruction Dataset based on Muti-sensor for Autonomous Exploration
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空间应用工程与技术中心）
Images are an important source of information for spacecraft navigation and for three-dimensional reconstruction of observed space objects. Both of these applications take the form of a triangulation problem when the camera has a known attitude and the measurements extracted from the image are line of sight (LOS) directions. This work provides a comprehensive review of the history and theoretical foundations of triangulation. A variety of classical triangulation algorithms are reviewed, including a number of suboptimal linear methods (many LOS measurements) and the optimal method of Hartley an…
