Underwater robot interventions require a high level of safety and reliability. A major challenge to address is a robust and accurate acquisition of localization estimates, as it is a prerequisite to enable more complex tasks, e.g. floating manipulation and mapping. State-of-the-art navigation in commercial operations, such as oil & gas production (OGP), rely on costly instrumentation. These can be partially replaced or assisted by visual navigation methods, especially in deep-sea scenarios where equipment deployment has high costs and risks. Our work presents a multimodal approach that adapts state-of-the-art methods from on-land robotics, i.e., dense point cloud generation in combination with plane representation and registration, to boost underwater localization performance. A two-stage navigation scheme is proposed that initially generates a coarse probabilistic map of the workspace, which is used to filter noise from computed point clouds and planes in the second stage. Furthermore, an adaptive decision-making approach is introduced that determines which perception cues to incorporate into the localization filter to optimize accuracy and computation performance. Our approach is investigated first in simulation and then validated with data from field trials in OGP monitoring and maintenance scenarios.
We introduce Air Learning, an open-source simulator, and a gym environment for deep reinforcement learning research on resource-constrained aerial robots. Equipped with domain randomization, Air Learning exposes a UAV agent to a diverse set of challenging scenarios. We seed the toolset with point-to-point obstacle avoidance tasks in three different environments and Deep Q Networks (DQN) and Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) trainers. Air Learning assesses the policies' performance under various quality-of-flight (QoF) metrics, such as the energy consumed, endurance, and the average trajectory length, on resource-constrained embedded platforms like a Raspberry Pi. We find that the trajectories on an embedded Ras-Pi are vastly different from those predicted on a high-end desktop system, resulting in up to 40% longer trajectories in one of the environments. To understand the source of such discrepancies, we use Air Learning to artificially degrade high-end desktop performance to mimic what happens on a low-end embedded system. We then propose a mitigation technique that uses the hardware-in-the-loop to determine the latency distribution of running the policy on the target platform (onboard compute on the aerial robot). A randomly sampled latency from the latency distribution is then added as an artificial delay within the training loop. Training the policy with artificial delays allows us to minimize the hardware gap (discrepancy in the flight time metric reduced from 37.73% to 0.5%). Thus, Air Learning with hardware-in-the-loop characterizes those differences and exposes how the onboard compute's choice affects the aerial robot's performance. We also conduct reliability studies to assess the effect of sensor failures on the learned policies. All put together, Air Learning enables a broad class of deep RL research on UAVs. The source code is available at:http://bit.ly/2JNAVb6.
Visual navigation in complex environments is inefficient with traditional reactive policy or general-purposed recurrent policy. To address the long-term memory issue, this paper proposes a graph attention memory (GAM) architecture consisting of memory construction module, graph attention module and control module. The memory construction module builds the topological graph based on supervised learning by taking the exploration prior. Then, guided attention features are extracted with the graph attention module. Finally, the deep reinforcement learning based control module makes decisions based on visual observations and guided attention features. Detailed convergence analysis of GAM is presented in this paper. We evaluate GAM-based navigation system in two complex 3D environments. Experimental results show that the GAM-based navigation system significantly improves learning efficiency and outperforms all baselines in average success rate.
We propose SplitNet, a method for decoupling visual perception and policy learning. By incorporating auxiliary tasks and selective learning of portions of the model, we explicitly decompose the learning objectives for visual navigation into perceiving the world and acting on that perception. We show dramatic improvements over baseline models on transferring between simulators, an encouraging step towards Sim2Real. Additionally, SplitNet generalizes better to unseen environments from the same simulator and transfers faster and more effectively to novel embodied navigation tasks. Further, given only a small sample from a target domain, SplitNet can match the performance of traditional end-to-end pipelines which receive the entire dataset. Code is available https://github.com/facebookresearch/splitnet
Nano-size unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), with few centimeters of diameter and sub-10 Watts of total power budget, have so far been considered incapable of running sophisticated visual-based autonomous navigation software without external aid from base-stations, ad-hoc local positioning infrastructure, and powerful external computation servers. In this work, we present what is, to the best of our knowledge, the first 27g nano-UAV system able to run aboard an end-to-end, closed-loop visual pipeline for autonomous navigation based on a state-of-the-art deep-learning algorithm, built upon the open-source CrazyFlie 2.0 nano-quadrotor. Our visual navigation engine is enabled by the combination of an ultra-low power computing device (the GAP8 system-on-chip) with a novel methodology for the deployment of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs). We enable onboard real-time execution of a state-of-the-art deep CNN at up to 18Hz. Field experiments demonstrate that the system's high responsiveness prevents collisions with unexpected dynamic obstacles up to a flight speed of 1.5m/s. In addition, we also demonstrate the capability of our visual navigation engine of fully autonomous indoor navigation on a 113m previously unseen path. To share our key findings with the embedded and robotics communities and foster further developments in autonomous nano-UAVs, we publicly release all our code, datasets, and trained networks.
his paper presents a simple approach for drone navigation to follow a predetermined path using visual input only without reliance on a Global Positioning System (GPS). A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is used to output the steering command of the drone in an end-to-end approach. We tested our approach in two simulated environments in the Unreal Engine using the AirSim plugin for drone simulation. Results show that the proposed approach, despite its simplicity, has average cross track distance less than 2.9 meters in the simulated environment. We also investigate the significance of data augmentation in path following. Finally, we conclude by suggesting possible enhancements for extending our approach to more difficult paths in real life, in the hope that one day visual navigation will become the norm in GPS-denied zones.
Self-supervised learning aims to learn representations from the data itself without explicit manual supervision. Existing efforts ignore a crucial aspect of self-supervised learning - the ability to scale to large amount of data because self-supervision requires no manual labels. In this work, we revisit this principle and scale two popular self-supervised approaches to 100 million images. We show that by scaling on various axes (including data size and problem 'hardness'), one can largely match or even exceed the performance of supervised pre-training on a variety of tasks such as object detection, surface normal estimation (3D) and visual navigation using reinforcement learning. Scaling these methods also provides many interesting insights into the limitations of current self-supervised techniques and evaluations. We conclude that current self-supervised methods are not 'hard' enough to take full advantage of large scale data and do not seem to learn effective high level semantic representations. We also introduce an extensive benchmark across 9 different datasets and tasks. We believe that such a benchmark along with comparable evaluation settings is necessary to make meaningful progress. Code is at: this https URL.
In this paper, we present a novel information processing architecture for safe deep learning-based visual navigation of autonomous systems. The proposed information processing architecture is used to support a perceptual attention-based predictive control algorithm that leverages model predictive control (MPC), convolutional neural networks (CNNs), and uncertainty quantification methods. The novelty of our approach lies in using MPC to learn how to place attention on relevant areas of the visual input, which ultimately allows the system to more rapidly detect unsafe conditions. We accomplish this by using MPC to learn to select regions of interest in the input image, which are used to output control actions as well as estimates of epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty in the attention-aware visual input. We use these uncertainty estimates to quantify the safety of our network controller under the current navigation condition. The proposed architecture and algorithm is tested on a 1:5 scale terrestrial vehicle. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms previous approaches on early detection of unsafe conditions, such as when novel obstacles are present in the navigation environment. The proposed architecture is the first step towards using deep learning-based perceptual control policies in safety-critical domains.
Many robotic applications require the agent to perform long-horizon tasks in partially observable environments. In such applications, decision making at any step can depend on observations received far in the past. Hence, being able to properly memorize and utilize the long-term history is crucial. In this work, we propose a novel memory-based policy, named Scene Memory Transformer (SMT). The proposed policy embeds and adds each observation to a memory and uses the attention mechanism to exploit spatio-temporal dependencies. This model is generic and can be efficiently trained with reinforcement learning over long episodes. On a range of visual navigation tasks, SMT demonstrates superior performance to existing reactive and memory-based policies by a margin.
Model-based control is a popular paradigm for robot navigation because it can leverage a known dynamics model to efficiently plan robust robot trajectories. However, it is challenging to use model-based methods in settings where the environment is a priori unknown and can only be observed partially through on-board sensors on the robot. In this work, we address this short-coming by coupling model-based control with learning-based perception. The learning-based perception module produces a series of waypoints that guide the robot to the goal via a collision-free path. These waypoints are used by a model-based planner to generate a smooth and dynamically feasible trajectory that is executed on the physical system using feedback control. Our experiments in simulated real-world cluttered environments and on an actual ground vehicle demonstrate that the proposed approach can reach goal locations more reliably and efficiently in novel environments as compared to purely geometric mapping-based or end-to-end learning-based alternatives. Our approach does not rely on detailed explicit 3D maps of the environment, works well with low frame rates, and generalizes well from simulation to the real world. Videos describing our approach and experiments are available on the project website.
Numerous past works have tackled the problem of task-driven navigation. But, how to effectively explore a new environment to enable a variety of down-stream tasks has received much less attention. In this work, we study how agents can autonomously explore realistic and complex 3D environments without the context of task-rewards. We propose a learning-based approach and investigate different policy architectures, reward functions, and training paradigms. We find that the use of policies with spatial memory that are bootstrapped with imitation learning and finally finetuned with coverage rewards derived purely from on-board sensors can be effective at exploring novel environments. We show that our learned exploration policies can explore better than classical approaches based on geometry alone and generic learning-based exploration techniques. Finally, we also show how such task-agnostic exploration can be used for down-stream tasks. Code and Videos are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/exploration-for-nav.
As deep learning continues to make progress for challenging perception tasks, there is increased interest in combining vision, language, and decision-making. Specifically, the Vision and Language Navigation (VLN) task involves navigating to a goal purely from language instructions and visual information without explicit knowledge of the goal. Recent successful approaches have made in-roads in achieving good success rates for this task but rely on beam search, which thoroughly explores a large number of trajectories and is unrealistic for applications such as robotics. In this paper, inspired by the intuition of viewing the problem as search on a navigation graph, we propose to use a progress monitor developed in prior work as a learnable heuristic for search. We then propose two modules incorporated into an end-to-end architecture: 1) A learned mechanism to perform backtracking, which decides whether to continue moving forward or roll back to a previous state (Regret Module) and 2) A mechanism to help the agent decide which direction to go next by showing directions that are visited and their associated progress estimate (Progress Marker). Combined, the proposed approach significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art methods using greedy action selection, with 5% absolute improvement on the test server in success rates, and more importantly 8% on success rates normalized by the path length.
Inspired by research in psychology, we introduce a behavioral approach for visual navigation using topological maps. Our goal is to enable a robot to navigate from one location to another, relying only on its visual input and the topological map of the environment. We propose using graph neural networks for localizing the agent in the map, and decompose the action space into primitive behaviors implemented as convolutional or recurrent neural networks. Using the Gibson simulator, we verify that our approach outperforms relevant baselines and is able to navigate in both seen and unseen environments.
Place recognition and loop closure detection are challenging for long-term visual navigation tasks. SeqSLAM is considered to be one of the most successful approaches to achieving long-term localization under varying environmental conditions and changing viewpoints. It depends on a brute-force, time-consuming sequential matching method. We propose MRS-VPR, a multi-resolution, sampling-based place recognition method, which can significantly improve the matching efficiency and accuracy in sequential matching. The novelty of this method lies in the coarse-to-fine searching pipeline and a particle filter-based global sampling scheme, that can balance the matching efficiency and accuracy in the long-term navigation task. Moreover, our model works much better than SeqSLAM when the testing sequence has a much smaller scale than the reference sequence. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method is efficient in locating short temporary trajectories within long-term reference ones without losing accuracy compared to SeqSLAM.
Recent efforts on training visual navigation agents conditioned on language using deep reinforcement learning have been successful in learning policies for different multimodal tasks, such as semantic goal navigation and embodied question answering. In this paper, we propose a multitask model capable of jointly learning these multimodal tasks, and transferring knowledge of words and their grounding in visual objects across the tasks. The proposed model uses a novel Dual-Attention unit to disentangle the knowledge of words in the textual representations and visual concepts in the visual representations, and align them with each other. This disentangled task-invariant alignment of representations facilitates grounding and knowledge transfer across both tasks. We show that the proposed model outperforms a range of baselines on both tasks in simulated 3D environments. We also show that this disentanglement of representations makes our model modular, interpretable, and allows for transfer to instructions containing new words by leveraging object detectors.
The Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task entails an agent following navigational instruction in photo-realistic unknown environments. This challenging task demands that the agent be aware of which instruction was completed, which instruction is needed next, which way to go, and its navigation progress towards the goal. In this paper, we introduce a self-monitoring agent with two complementary components: (1) visual-textual co-grounding module to locate the instruction completed in the past, the instruction required for the next action, and the next moving direction from surrounding images and (2) progress monitor to ensure the grounded instruction correctly reflects the navigation progress. We test our self-monitoring agent on a standard benchmark and analyze our proposed approach through a series of ablation studies that elucidate the contributions of the primary components. Using our proposed method, we set the new state of the art by a significant margin (8% absolute increase in success rate on the unseen test set). Code is available at https://github.com/chihyaoma/selfmonitoring-agent .
A safe and robust on-road navigation system is a crucial component of achieving fully automated vehicles. NVIDIA recently proposed an End-to-End algorithm that can directly learn steering commands from raw pixels of a front camera by using one convolutional neural network. In this paper, we leverage auxiliary information aside from raw images and design a novel network structure, called Auxiliary Task Network (ATN), to help boost the driving performance while maintaining the advantage of minimal training data and an End-to-End training method. In this network, we introduce human prior knowledge into vehicle navigation by transferring features from image recognition tasks. Image semantic segmentation is applied as an auxiliary task for navigation. We consider temporal information by introducing an LSTM module and optical flow to the network. Finally, we combine vehicle kinematics with a sensor fusion step. We discuss the benefits of our method over state-of-the-art visual navigation methods both in the Udacity simulation environment and on the real-world Comma.ai dataset.
Learning is an inherently continuous phenomenon. When humans learn a new task there is no explicit distinction between training and inference. As we learn a task, we keep learning about it while performing the task. What we learn and how we learn it varies during different stages of learning. Learning how to learn and adapt is a key property that enables us to generalize effortlessly to new settings. This is in contrast with conventional settings in machine learning where a trained model is frozen during inference. In this paper we study the problem of learning to learn at both training and test time in the context of visual navigation. A fundamental challenge in navigation is generalization to unseen scenes. In this paper we propose a self-adaptive visual navigation method (SAVN) which learns to adapt to new environments without any explicit supervision. Our solution is a meta-reinforcement learning approach where an agent learns a self-supervised interaction loss that encourages effective navigation. Our experiments, performed in the AI2-THOR framework, show major improvements in both success rate and SPL for visual navigation in novel scenes. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/allenai/savn .
Being able to navigate to a target with minimal supervision and prior knowledge is critical to creating human-like assistive agents. Prior work on map-based and map-less approaches have limited generalizability. In this paper, we present a novel approach, Hybrid Asynchronous Universal Successor Representations (HAUSR), which overcomes the problem of generalizability to new goals by adapting recent work on Universal Successor Representations with Asynchronous Actor-Critic Agents. We show that the agent was able to successfully reach novel goals and we were able to quickly fine-tune the network for adapting to new scenes. This opens up novel application scenarios where intelligent agents could learn from and adapt to a wide range of environments with minimal human input.
Vision-language navigation (VLN) is the task of navigating an embodied agent to carry out natural language instructions inside real 3D environments. In this paper, we study how to address three critical challenges for this task: the cross-modal grounding, the ill-posed feedback, and the generalization problems. First, we propose a novel Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching (RCM) approach that enforces cross-modal grounding both locally and globally via reinforcement learning (RL). Particularly, a matching critic is used to provide an intrinsic reward to encourage global matching between instructions and trajectories, and a reasoning navigator is employed to perform cross-modal grounding in the local visual scene. Evaluation on a VLN benchmark dataset shows that our RCM model significantly outperforms previous methods by 10% on SPL and achieves the new state-of-the-art performance. To improve the generalizability of the learned policy, we further introduce a Self-Supervised Imitation Learning (SIL) method to explore unseen environments by imitating its own past, good decisions. We demonstrate that SIL can approximate a better and more efficient policy, which tremendously minimizes the success rate performance gap between seen and unseen environments (from 30.7% to 11.7%).