Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting Visually-Grounded Navigation Instructions in Real Environments

• Published in: 2018 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition pp. 3674 - 3683
• Main Authors: Anderson, Peter, Wu, Qi, Teney, Damien, Bruce, Jake, Johnson, Mark, Sunderhauf, Niko, Reid, Ian, Gould, Stephen, van den Hengel, Anton
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.06.2018
• Subjects: Cameras; Natural languages; Navigation; Robots; Task analysis; Three-dimensional displays; Visualization
• DOI: 10.1109/CVPR.2018.00387

A robot that can carry out a natural-language instruction has been a dream since before the Jetsons cartoon series imagined a life of leisure mediated by a fleet of attentive robot helpers. It is a dream that remains stubbornly distant. However, recent advances in vision and language methods have made incredible progress in closely related areas. This is significant because a robot interpreting a natural-language navigation instruction on the basis of what it sees is carrying out a vision and language process that is similar to Visual Question Answering. Both tasks can be interpreted as visually grounded sequence-to-sequence translation problems, and many of the same methods are applicable. To enable and encourage the application of vision and language methods to the problem of interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions, we present the Matter-port3D Simulator - a large-scale reinforcement learning environment based on real imagery [11]. Using this simulator, which can in future support a range of embodied vision and language tasks, we provide the first benchmark dataset for visually-grounded natural language navigation in real buildings - the Room-to-Room (R2R) dataset1.