CuriousBot: Interactive Mobile Exploration via Actionable 3D Relational Object Graph
This addresses the problem of limited interaction in mobile exploration for robotics, though it appears incremental by extending interaction methods from tabletop to mobile scenes.
The paper tackled the challenge of mobile robotic exploration by introducing a 3D relational object graph to enable active interaction, and the results showed it outperformed vision-language model-based methods in effectiveness and generalization.
Mobile exploration is a longstanding challenge in robotics, yet current methods primarily focus on active perception instead of active interaction, limiting the robot's ability to interact with and fully explore its environment. Existing robotic exploration approaches via active interaction are often restricted to tabletop scenes, neglecting the unique challenges posed by mobile exploration, such as large exploration spaces, complex action spaces, and diverse object relations. In this work, we introduce a 3D relational object graph that encodes diverse object relations and enables exploration through active interaction. We develop a system based on this representation and evaluate it across diverse scenes. Our qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate the system's effectiveness and generalization capabilities, outperforming methods that rely solely on vision-language models (VLMs).