Interactive Gibson Benchmark (iGibson 0.5): A Benchmark for Interactive Navigation in Cluttered Environments
This benchmark addresses the need for standardized evaluation in robotics for interactive navigation tasks, enabling researchers to compare solutions, though it is incremental as it builds on existing simulation environments.
The authors introduced the Interactive Gibson Benchmark (iGibson 0.5), the first comprehensive benchmark for training and evaluating interactive navigation in robotics, where robots can physically interact with objects to clear paths, and they provided learning-based baselines to analyze trade-offs between path efficiency and object disturbance.
We present Interactive Gibson Benchmark, the first comprehensive benchmark for training and evaluating Interactive Navigation: robot navigation strategies where physical interaction with objects is allowed and even encouraged to accomplish a task. For example, the robot can move objects if needed in order to clear a path leading to the goal location. Our benchmark comprises two novel elements: 1) a new experimental setup, the Interactive Gibson Environment (iGibson 0.5), which simulates high fidelity visuals of indoor scenes, and high fidelity physical dynamics of the robot and common objects found in these scenes; 2) a set of Interactive Navigation metrics which allows one to study the interplay between navigation and physical interaction. We present and evaluate multiple learning-based baselines in Interactive Gibson, and provide insights into regimes of navigation with different trade-offs between navigation path efficiency and disturbance of surrounding objects. We make our benchmark publicly available(https://sites.google.com/view/interactivegibsonenv) and encourage researchers from all disciplines in robotics (e.g. planning, learning, control) to propose, evaluate, and compare their Interactive Navigation solutions in Interactive Gibson.