13,466 research outputs found
Learning Models for Following Natural Language Directions in Unknown Environments
Natural language offers an intuitive and flexible means for humans to
communicate with the robots that we will increasingly work alongside in our
homes and workplaces. Recent advancements have given rise to robots that are
able to interpret natural language manipulation and navigation commands, but
these methods require a prior map of the robot's environment. In this paper, we
propose a novel learning framework that enables robots to successfully follow
natural language route directions without any previous knowledge of the
environment. The algorithm utilizes spatial and semantic information that the
human conveys through the command to learn a distribution over the metric and
semantic properties of spatially extended environments. Our method uses this
distribution in place of the latent world model and interprets the natural
language instruction as a distribution over the intended behavior. A novel
belief space planner reasons directly over the map and behavior distributions
to solve for a policy using imitation learning. We evaluate our framework on a
voice-commandable wheelchair. The results demonstrate that by learning and
performing inference over a latent environment model, the algorithm is able to
successfully follow natural language route directions within novel, extended
environments.Comment: ICRA 201
Holistic Temporal Situation Interpretation for Traffic Participant Prediction
For a profound understanding of traffic situations including a prediction of traf-
fic participants’ future motion, behaviors and routes it is crucial to incorporate all
available environmental observations. The presence of sensor noise and depen-
dency uncertainties, the variety of available sensor data, the complexity of large
traffic scenes and the large number of different estimation tasks with diverging
requirements require a general method that gives a robust foundation for the de-
velopment of estimation applications.
In this work, a general description language, called Object-Oriented Factor Graph
Modeling Language (OOFGML), is proposed, that unifies formulation of esti-
mation tasks from the application-oriented problem description via the choice
of variable and probability distribution representation through to the inference
method definition in implementation. The different language properties are dis-
cussed theoretically using abstract examples.
The derivation of explicit application examples is shown for the automated driv-
ing domain. A domain-specific ontology is defined which forms the basis for
four exemplary applications covering the broad spectrum of estimation tasks in
this domain: Basic temporal filtering, ego vehicle localization using advanced
interpretations of perceived objects, road layout perception utilizing inter-object
dependencies and finally highly integrated route, behavior and motion estima-
tion to predict traffic participant’s future actions. All applications are evaluated
as proof of concept and provide an example of how their class of estimation tasks
can be represented using the proposed language. The language serves as a com-
mon basis and opens a new field for further research towards holistic solutions
for automated driving
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