Atakan Dag

Lauri Suomela, Jussi Kalliola, Atakan Dag et al.

This work introduces a simulator-based benchmark for visual localization in the autonomous navigation context. The dynamic benchmark enables investigation of how variables such as the time of day, weather, and camera perspective affect the navigation performance of autonomous agents that utilize visual localization for closed-loop control. The experimental part of the paper studies the effects of four such variables by evaluating state-of-the-art visual localization methods as part of the motion planning module of an autonomous navigation stack. The results show major variation in the suitability of the different methods for vision-based navigation. To the authors' best knowledge, the proposed benchmark is the first to study modern visual localization methods as part of a complete navigation stack. We make the benchmark available at https://github.com/lasuomela/carla_vloc_benchmark.

Atakan Dag, Alexandre Angleraud, Wenyan Yang et al.

Simulation to real (Sim-to-Real) is an attractive approach to construct controllers for robotic tasks that are easier to simulate than to analytically solve. Working Sim-to-Real solutions have been demonstrated for tasks with a clear single objective such as "reach the target". Real world applications, however, often consist of multiple simultaneous objectives such as "reach the target" but "avoid obstacles". A straightforward solution in the context of reinforcement learning (RL) is to combine multiple objectives into a multi-term reward function and train a single monolithic controller. Recently, a hybrid solution based on pre-trained single objective controllers and a switching rule between them was proposed. In this work, we compare these two approaches in the multi-objective setting of a robot manipulator to reach a target while avoiding an obstacle. Our findings show that the training of a hybrid controller is easier and obtains a better success-failure trade-off than a monolithic controller. The controllers trained in simulator were verified by a real set-up.