Title
Long Range Neural Navigation Policies for the Real World
Abstract
Learned Neural Network based policies have shown promising results for robot navigation. However, most of these approaches fall short of being used on a real robot due to the extensive simulated training they require. These simulations lack the visuals and dynamics of the real world, which makes it infeasible to deploy on a real robot. We present a novel Neural Net based policy, NavNet, which allows for easy deployment on a real robot. It consists of two sub policies - a high level policy which can understand real images and perform long range planning expressed in high level commands; a low level policy that can translate the long range plan into low level commands on a specific platform in a safe and robust manner. For every new deployment, the high level policy is trained on an easily obtainable scan of the environment modeling its visuals and layout. We detail the design of such an environment and how one can use it for training a final navigation policy. Further, we demonstrate a learned low-level policy. We deploy the model in a large office building and test it extensively, achieving 0.80 success rate over long navigation runs and outperforming SLAM-based models in the same settings.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968004
2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Keywords
Field
DocType
long range neural navigation policies,robot navigation,simulated training,visuals,neural net based policy,high level policy,long range planning,high level commands,low level commands,navigation policy,low-level policy,long navigation runs
Long-range planning,Software deployment,Real-time computing,Control engineering,Real image,Engineering,Robot,Artificial neural network
Journal
Volume
ISSN
ISBN
abs/1903.09870
2153-0858
978-1-7281-4005-6
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
3
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ayzaan Wahid100.34
Alexander Toshev2137873.90
Marek Fiser3293.66
Tsang-Wei Edward Lee462.15