A Survey of Embodied AI: From Simulators to Research Tasks

There has been an emerging paradigm shift from the era of "internet AI" to "embodied AI", where AI algorithms and agents no longer learn from datasets of images, videos or text curated primarily from the internet. Instead, they learn through interactions with their environments from an egocentric perception similar to humans. Consequently, there has been substantial growth in the demand for embodied AI simulators to support various embodied AI research tasks. This growing interest in embodied AI is beneficial to the greater pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), but there has not been a contemporary and comprehensive survey of this field. This paper aims to provide an encyclopedic survey for the field of embodied AI, from its simulators to its research. By evaluating nine current embodied AI simulators with our proposed seven features, this paper aims to understand the simulators in their provision for use in embodied AI research and their limitations. Lastly, this paper surveys the three main research tasks in embodied AI -- visual exploration, visual navigation and embodied question answering (QA), covering the state-of-the-art approaches, evaluation metrics and datasets. Finally, with the new insights revealed through surveying the field, the paper will provide suggestions for simulator-for-task selections and recommendations for the future directions of the field.Comment: Under Review for IEEE TETC

Récursions chimériques

L’une des caractéristiques des créatures artificielles se fonde sur un rapport de continuité et d’indépendance vis-à-vis des modèles dont elles empruntent l’aspect. La robotique autonome ne semble pouvoir échapper à cette relation entre imitation et invention. En cherchant ainsi à préciser sa conception mécaniste du corps par la production d’objets spécifiques, cette forme récente de robotique induit une transformation qui confond, dans les objets qu’elle crée, des régimes symboliques d’existence relevant pourtant d’ontologies bien distinctes. Nous explorerons d’abord quelques aspects formels du transfert de ces éléments d’ontologie aux objets. Nous tenterons alors de comprendre comment, à travers leurs actes, les robots permettent de figurer une image du corps humain. Nous nous appuierons sur une série d’analogies construites par les roboticiens dans le cadre d’une compétition de machines autonomes.One of the characteristics of artificial entities is the way in which they embody relationships of both continuity and independence vis-a-vis the models whose likeness they assume. Indeed, autonomous robotics seems unable to escape this tension between imitation and invention. Its efforts to translate a mechanistic conception of the body into specific objects have led to a situation where these objects hypostasize different symbolic regimes of existence (associated with different ontologies). This article begins by exploring several formal aspects of this process by which ontological elements are transferred to objects. It then seeks to understand how robotic actions give body to an image of the human form. It makes use of a series of analogies employed by roboticians during a competition between autonomous robots