Object-oriented Targets for Visual Navigation using Rich Semantic Representations

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.Comment: Presented at NIPS workshop (ViGIL

Autonomous Navigation in Complex Environments with Deep Multimodal Fusion Network

Autonomous navigation in complex environments is a crucial task in time-sensitive scenarios such as disaster response or search and rescue. However, complex environments pose significant challenges for autonomous platforms to navigate due to their challenging properties: constrained narrow passages, unstable pathway with debris and obstacles, or irregular geological structures and poor lighting conditions. In this work, we propose a multimodal fusion approach to address the problem of autonomous navigation in complex environments such as collapsed cites, or natural caves. We first simulate the complex environments in a physics-based simulation engine and collect a large-scale dataset for training. We then propose a Navigation Multimodal Fusion Network (NMFNet) which has three branches to effectively handle three visual modalities: laser, RGB images, and point cloud data. The extensively experimental results show that our NMFNet outperforms recent state of the art by a fair margin while achieving real-time performance. We further show that the use of multiple modalities is essential for autonomous navigation in complex environments. Finally, we successfully deploy our network to both simulated and real mobile robots.Comment: Accepted to IROS 202

Autonomous Navigation with Mobile Robots using Deep Learning and the Robot Operating System

Autonomous navigation is a long-standing field of robotics research, which provides an essential capability for mobile robots to execute a series of tasks on the same environments performed by human everyday. In this chapter, we present a set of algorithms to train and deploy deep networks for autonomous navigation of mobile robots using the Robot Operation System (ROS). We describe three main steps to tackle this problem: i) collecting data in simulation environments using ROS and Gazebo; ii) designing deep network for autonomous navigation, and iii) deploying the learned policy on mobile robots in both simulation and real-world. Theoretically, we present deep learning architectures for robust navigation in normal environments (e.g., man-made houses, roads) and complex environments (e.g., collapsed cities, or natural caves). We further show that the use of visual modalities such as RGB, Lidar, and point cloud is essential to improve the autonomy of mobile robots. Our project website and demonstration video can be found at https://sites.google.com/site/autonomousnavigationros.Comment: 18 pages. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2007.1594