AAAI Conference 1996 Conference Paper
Navigation for Everyday Life
- Daniel D. Fu
Past work in navigation has worked toward the goal of producing an accurate map of the environment. While no one can deny the usefulness of such a map, the ideal of producing a complete map becomes unrealistic when an agent is faced with performing real tasks. And yet an agent accomplishing recurring tasks should navigate more efficiently as time goes by. We present a system which integrates navigation, planning, and vision. In this view, navigation supports the needs of a larger system as opposed to being a task in its own right. Whereas previous approaches assume an unknown and unstructured environment, we assume a structured environment whose organization is known, but whose specifics are unknown. The system is endowed with a wide range of visual capabilities as well as search plans for informed exploration of a simulated store constructed from real visual data. We demonstrate the agent finding items while mapping the world. In repeatedly retrieving items, the agent’ s performance improves as the learned map becomes more useful.