Deep Learning for Embodied Vision Navigation: A Survey

"Embodied visual navigation" problem requires an agent to navigate in a 3D environment mainly rely on its first-person observation. This problem has attracted rising attention in recent years due to its wide application in autonomous driving, vacuum cleaner, and rescue robot. A navigation agent is supposed to have various intelligent skills, such as visual perceiving, mapping, planning, exploring and reasoning, etc. Building such an agent that observes, thinks, and acts is a key to real intelligence. The remarkable learning ability of deep learning methods empowered the agents to accomplish embodied visual navigation tasks. Despite this, embodied visual navigation is still in its infancy since a lot of advanced skills are required, including perceiving partially observed visual input, exploring unseen areas, memorizing and modeling seen scenarios, understanding cross-modal instructions, and adapting to a new environment, etc. Recently, embodied visual navigation has attracted rising attention of the community, and numerous works has been proposed to learn these skills. This paper attempts to establish an outline of the current works in the field of embodied visual navigation by providing a comprehensive literature survey. We summarize the benchmarks and metrics, review different methods, analysis the challenges, and highlight the state-of-the-art methods. Finally, we discuss unresolved challenges in the field of embodied visual navigation and give promising directions in pursuing future research.