An Exploration of Embodied Visual Exploration

Embodied computer vision considers perception for robots in general, unstructured environments. Of particular importance is the embodied visual exploration problem: how might a robot equipped with a camera scope out a new environment? Despite the progress thus far, many basic questions pertinent to this problem remain unanswered: (i) What does it mean for an agent to explore its environment well? (ii) Which methods work well, and under which assumptions and environmental settings? (iii) Where do current approaches fall short, and where might future work seek to improve? Seeking answers to these questions, we perform a thorough empirical study of four state-of-the-art paradigms on two photorealistic simulated 3D environments. We present a taxonomy of key exploration methods and a standard framework for benchmarking visual exploration algorithms. Our experimental results offer insights, and suggest new performance metrics and baselines for future work in visual exploration.