PlaceNav: Topological Navigation through Place Recognition

Recent results suggest that splitting topological navigation into robot-independent and robot-specific components improves navigation performance by enabling the robot-independent part to be trained with data collected by different robot types. However, the navigation methods are still limited by the scarcity of suitable training data and suffer from poor computational scaling. In this work, we present PlaceNav, subdividing the robot-independent part into navigation-specific and generic computer vision components. We utilize visual place recognition for the subgoal selection of the topological navigation pipeline. This makes subgoal selection more efficient and enables leveraging large-scale datasets from non-robotics sources, increasing training data availability. Bayesian filtering, enabled by place recognition, further improves navigation performance by increasing the temporal consistency of subgoals. Our experimental results verify the design and the new model obtains a 76% higher success rate in indoor and 23% higher in outdoor navigation tasks with higher computational efficiency.

A Simulation Benchmark for Vision-based Autonomous Navigation

This work introduces a simulator benchmark for vision-based autonomous navigation. The simulator offers control over real world variables such as the environment, time of day, weather and traffic. The benchmark includes a modular integration of different components of a full autonomous visual navigation stack. In the experimental part of the paper, state-of-the-art visual localization methods are evaluated as a part of the stack in realistic navigation tasks. To the authors' best knowledge, the proposed benchmark is the first to study modern visual localization methods as part of a full autonomous visual navigation stack.