VLPG-Nav: Object Navigation Using Visual Language Pose Graph and Object Localization Probability Maps

We present VLPG-Nav, a visual language navigation method for guiding robots to specified objects within household scenes. Unlike existing methods primarily focused on navigating the robot toward objects, our approach considers the additional challenge of centering the object within the robot’s camera view. Our method builds a visual language pose graph (VLPG) that functions as a spatial map of VL embeddings. Given an open-vocabulary object query, we plan a viewpoint for object navigation using the VLPG. Despite navigating to the viewpoint, real-world challenges such as object occlusion, displacement, and the robot’s localization errors can prevent visibility. We build an object localization probability map that leverages the robot’s current observations and prior VLPG. When the object is not visible, the probability map is updated, and an alternate viewpoint is computed. In addition, we propose an object-centering formulation that locally adjusts the robot’s pose to center the object in the camera view. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach through simulations and real-world experiments, evaluating its ability to successfully view and center the object within the camera’s field of view. VLPG-Nav demonstrates improved performance in locating the object, navigating around occlusions, and centering the object within the robot’s camera view, outperforming selected baselines in the evaluation settings.

Authors

• Senthil Hariharan Arul
• Dhruva Kumar
• Vivek Sugirtharaj
• Richard Kim
• Xuewei Tony Qi
• Rajasimman Madhivanan
• Arnie Sen
• Dinesh Manocha

Keywords

• Location awareness
• Visualization
• Navigation
• Robot vision systems
• Object detection
• Kinematics
• Cameras
• Cost function
• Noise measurement
• Robots
• Probability Function
• Object Location
• Visibility Graph
• Pose Graph
• Object Navigation
• Field Of View
• Localization Error
• Real-world Experiments
• Camera View
• Objective View
• Alternative Viewpoints
• Occluded Objects
• Urban Planning
• Local Search
• Grid Cells
• Line-of-sight
• Simulation Environment
• Bounding Box
• Object Of Interest
• Robot Navigation
• Object Displacement
• Household Environment
• Center Of The Bounding Box
• Central Objective
• Highest Similarity Score
• Local Map
• Grid Map
• Saliency Map