BEyond observation: an approach for ObjectNav
This work addresses autonomous navigation for unmanned vehicles, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods without introducing major innovations.
The paper tackled the Object-Goal Navigation task by using sensor data fusion and machine learning to enable autonomous navigation to target objects without prior environmental knowledge, achieving fourth place in the Habitat Challenge 2021 on both Minival and Test-Standard phases.
With the rise of automation, unmanned vehicles became a hot topic both as commercial products and as a scientific research topic. It composes a multi-disciplinary field of robotics that encompasses embedded systems, control theory, path planning, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), scene reconstruction, and pattern recognition. In this work, we present our exploratory research of how sensor data fusion and state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms can perform the Embodied Artificial Intelligence (E-AI) task called Visual Semantic Navigation. This task, a.k.a Object-Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) consists of autonomous navigation using egocentric visual observations to reach an object belonging to the target semantic class without prior knowledge of the environment. Our method reached fourth place on the Habitat Challenge 2021 ObjectNav on the Minival phase and the Test-Standard Phase.