Title: Advancing Household Robots with Self-Supervised AI
Introduction:
Household robots are expected to perform tasks effortlessly, including navigating to specific locations without the need for extensive annotations. However, existing approaches for object navigation fail to test on real robots and often rely on costly semantically labeled 3D meshes. In this article, we explore a groundbreaking solution that enables a household robot to learn and navigate like a human child, through self-supervised AI models.
1. Building Self-Supervised Models through Exploration:
Our objective is to develop an embodied agent that can autonomously construct models of its surroundings by exploring its environment. Similar to how a child learns about the world, our agent relies on exploration to acquire knowledge. By leveraging this approach, we propose to train a semantic segmentation model of 3D objects, using self-labeled 3D meshes.
2. Utilizing Location Consistency as Supervision Signal:
Embodying agents can effectively use location consistency as a supervision signal. This involves capturing images from various viewpoints and angles and applying contrastive learning techniques to refine the semantic segmentation model. In doing so, the agent understands spatial relations and identifies objects accurately.
3. Outperforming Self-Supervised Baselines:
Through rigorous experimentation, our framework exhibits superior performance compared to other self-supervised baselines. Remarkably, it also performs competitively when compared to supervised baselines. These results were observed in both simulation environments and real-world households.
Conclusion:
With our self-supervised AI models, household robots can now seamlessly navigate to specified destinations without relying on annotated data or expensive 3D meshes. By mimicking the way children learn from exploration, our approach opens up new possibilities for improved robot autonomy. The breakthrough use of location consistency as a supervision signal has proven to be highly effective in acquiring knowledge about the environment. As a result, our framework significantly enhances the capabilities of household robots, making them more intelligent, adaptable, and user-friendly.