Ving: Learning Open-World Navigation with Visual Goals

Dhruv Shah, Benjamin Eysenbach, Gregory Kahn, Nicholas Rhinehart, Sergey Levine

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

42 Scopus citations

Abstract

We propose a learning-based navigation system for reaching visually indicated goals and demonstrate this system on a real mobile robot platform. Learning provides an appealing alternative to conventional methods for robotic navigation: instead of reasoning about environments in terms of geometry and maps, learning can enable a robot to learn about navigational affordances, understand what types of obstacles are traversable (e.g., tall grass) or not (e.g., walls), and generalize over patterns in the environment. However, unlike conventional planning algorithms, it is harder to change the goal for a learned policy during deployment. We propose a method for learning to navigate towards a goal image of the desired destination. By combining a learned policy with a topological graph constructed out of previously observed data, our system can determine how to reach this visually indicated goal even in the presence of variable appearance and lighting. Three key insights, waypoint proposal, graph pruning and negative mining, enable our method to learn to navigate in real-world environments using only offline data, a setting where prior methods struggle. We instantiate our method on a real outdoor ground robot and show that our system, which we call ViNG, outperforms previously-proposed methods for goal-conditioned reinforcement learning, including other methods that incorporate reinforcement learning and search. We also study how ViNG generalizes to unseen environments and evaluate its ability to adapt to such an environment with growing experience. Finally, we demonstrate ViNG on a number of real-world applications, such as last-mile delivery and warehouse inspection. We encourage the reader to visit the project website for videos of our experiments and demonstrations.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2021
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages13215-13222
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781728190778
DOIs
StatePublished - 2021
Externally publishedYes
Event2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2021 - Xi'an, China
Duration: May 30 2021Jun 5 2021

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Volume2021-May
ISSN (Print)1050-4729

Conference

Conference2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2021
Country/TerritoryChina
CityXi'an
Period5/30/216/5/21

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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