English

MultiON: Benchmarking Semantic Map Memory using Multi-Object Navigation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2020-12-08 v1 Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Robotics

Abstract

Navigation tasks in photorealistic 3D environments are challenging because they require perception and effective planning under partial observability. Recent work shows that map-like memory is useful for long-horizon navigation tasks. However, a focused investigation of the impact of maps on navigation tasks of varying complexity has not yet been performed. We propose the multiON task, which requires navigation to an episode-specific sequence of objects in a realistic environment. MultiON generalizes the ObjectGoal navigation task and explicitly tests the ability of navigation agents to locate previously observed goal objects. We perform a set of multiON experiments to examine how a variety of agent models perform across a spectrum of navigation task complexities. Our experiments show that: i) navigation performance degrades dramatically with escalating task complexity; ii) a simple semantic map agent performs surprisingly well relative to more complex neural image feature map agents; and iii) even oracle map agents achieve relatively low performance, indicating the potential for future work in training embodied navigation agents using maps. Video summary: https://youtu.be/yqTlHNIcgnY

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2012.03912,
  title  = {MultiON: Benchmarking Semantic Map Memory using Multi-Object Navigation},
  author = {Saim Wani and Shivansh Patel and Unnat Jain and Angel X. Chang and Manolis Savva},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.03912},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

Project page: https://shivanshpatel35.github.io/multi-ON/ ; the first three authors contributed equally