Developing embodied agents in simulation has been a key research topic in
recent years. Exciting new tasks, algorithms, and benchmarks have been
developed in various simulators. However, most of them assume deaf agents in
silent environments, while we humans perceive the world with multiple senses.
We introduce Sonicverse, a multisensory simulation platform with integrated
audio-visual simulation for training household agents that can both see and
hear. Sonicverse models realistic continuous audio rendering in 3D environments
in real-time. Together with a new audio-visual VR interface that allows humans
to interact with agents with audio, Sonicverse enables a series of embodied AI
tasks that need audio-visual perception. For semantic audio-visual navigation
in particular, we also propose a new multi-task learning model that achieves
state-of-the-art performance. In addition, we demonstrate Sonicverse's realism
via sim-to-real transfer, which has not been achieved by other simulators: an
agent trained in Sonicverse can successfully perform audio-visual navigation in
real-world environments. Sonicverse is available at:
https://github.com/StanfordVL/Sonicverse.Comment: In ICRA 2023. Project page:
https://ai.stanford.edu/~rhgao/sonicverse/. Code:
https://github.com/StanfordVL/sonicverse. Gao and Li contributed equally to
this work and are in alphabetical orde