Learning Exploration Policies for Navigation [article]

Tao Chen, Saurabh Gupta, Abhinav Gupta
2019 arXiv   pre-print
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
more » ... ial 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.
arXiv:1903.01959v1 fatcat:2wudy6pgonhdpgfy6u4vjprryi