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arXiv · 2305.01098

IndoorSim-to-OutdoorReal: Learning to Navigate Outdoors without any Outdoor Experience

Joanne Truong·April Zitkovich·Sonia Chernova·Dhruv Batra·Tingnan Zhang·Jie Tan·Wenhao Yu
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Abstract

We present IndoorSim-to-OutdoorReal (I2O), an end-to-end learned visual navigation approach, trained solely in simulated short-range indoor environments, and demonstrates zero-shot sim-to-real transfer to the outdoors for long-range navigation on the Spot robot. Our method uses zero real-world experience (indoor or outdoor), and requires the simulator to model no predominantly-outdoor phenomenon (sloped grounds, sidewalks, etc). The key to I2O transfer is in providing the robot with additional context of the environment (i.e., a satellite map, a rough sketch of a map by a human, etc.) to guide the robot's navigation in the real-world. The provided context-maps do not need to be accurate or complete -- real-world obstacles (e.g., trees, bushes, pedestrians, etc.) are not drawn on the map, and openings are not aligned with where they are in the real-world. Crucially, these inaccurate context-maps provide a hint to the robot about a route to take to the goal. We find that our method that leverages Context-Maps is able to successfully navigate hundreds of meters in novel environments, avoiding novel obstacles on its path, to a distant goal without a single collision or human intervention. In comparison, policies without the additional context fail completely. Lastly, we test the robustness of the Context-Map policy by adding varying degrees of noise to the map in simulation. We find that the Context-Map policy is surprisingly robust to noise in the provided context-map. In the presence of significantly inaccurate maps (corrupted with 50% noise, or entirely blank maps), the policy gracefully regresses to the behavior of a policy with no context. Videos are available at https://www.joannetruong.com/projects/i2o.html

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Joanne Truong, April Zitkovich, Sonia Chernova, Dhruv Batra, Tingnan Zhang, Jie Tan, Wenhao Yu. 2023-05-01. IndoorSim-to-OutdoorReal: Learning to Navigate Outdoors without any Outdoor Experience. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.01098

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