Knowledge-Driven Visual Target Navigation: Dual Graph Navigation

In unknown environments, navigating a robot by a given image to a specific location or instance is critical and challenging. The existing end-to-end approaches require simultaneous implicit learning of multiple subtasks, and modular approaches depend on metric information. Both approaches face high computational demands, often leading to difficulties in real-time updates and limited generalization, making them challenging to implement on resource-constrained devices. To address these challenges, we propose Dual Graph Navigation (DGN), a knowledge-driven, lightweight image instance navigation framework. DGN builds an External Knowledge Graph (EKG) from small-scale datasets to capture prior object correlations, efficiently guiding target exploration. During exploration, DGN builds an Internal Knowledge Graph (IKG) using an instance-aware module, which records explored objects based on reachability relationships rather than precise metric information. The IKG dynamically updates the EKG, enhancing the robot's adaptability to the current environment. Together, they realize topological perception and reduce computational overhead. Furthermore, unlike approaches characterized by over-dependence between components, DGN employs a plug-and-play modular design that allows independent training and flexible replacement of functional modules, effectively enhancing generalization performance while reducing training and deployment costs. Experiments illustrate that DGN generalizes well in different simulation environments (AI2-THOR, Habitat), achieving state-of-the-art performance on the ProcTHOR-10K dataset. It is compatible with three distinct real-world robot platforms, including edge computing devices without CUDA support. It exhibits a decision-making speed of 3. 8 to 5. 5 times over baseline methods. Further details can be found on the project page: https://dogplanningloyo.github.io/DGN/.

Authors

• Shiyao Li
• Ziyang Meng
• Jiansong Pei
• Jiahao Chen
• Bingcheng Dong
• Guangsheng Li
• Shenglan Liu 0001
• Feilong Wang

Keywords

• Training
• Performance evaluation
• Visualization
• Navigation
• Habitats
• Graphics processing units
• Knowledge graphs
• Electrocardiography
• Real-time systems
• Robots
• Dual Graph
• Reachable
• Computational Overhead
• Training Costs
• Modular Design
• Robotic Platform
• Modular Approach
• Unknown Environment
• Deployment Cost
• Resource-constrained Devices
• Semantic
• Long-term Memory
• Intel Core
• Random Walk
• Target Image
• Indoor Environments
• Real-world Scenarios
• Path Planning
• Target Recognition
• Machine Vision
• Modular Method
• Online Update
• Navigation Performance
• Modular Framework