Deep Visual Navigation under Partial Observability

How can a robot navigate successfully in rich and diverse environments, indoors or outdoors, along office corridors or trails on the grassland, on the flat ground or the staircase? To this end, this work aims to address three challenges: (i) complex visual observations, (ii) partial observability of local visual sensing, and (iii) multimodal robot behaviors conditioned on both the local environment and the global navigation objective. We propose to train a neural network (NN) controller for local navigation via imitation learning. To tackle complex visual observations, we extract multi-scale spatial representations through CNNs. To tackle partial observability, we aggregate multi-scale spatial information over time and encode it in LSTMs. To learn multimodal behaviors, we use a separate memory module for each behavior mode. Importantly, we integrate the multiple neural network modules into a unified controller that achieves robust performance for visual navigation in complex, partially observable environments. We implemented the controller on the quadrupedal Spot robot and evaluated it on three challenging tasks: adversarial pedestrian avoidance, blind-spot obstacle avoidance, and elevator riding. The experiments show that the proposed NN architecture significantly improves navigation performance.