Catch Me If You Hear Me: Audio-Visual Navigation in Complex Unmapped Environments with Moving Sounds

Understand

Audio-visual navigation combines sight and hearing to navigate to a sound-emitting source in an unmapped environment.

• While recent approaches have demonstrated the benefits of audio input to detect and find the goal, they focus on clean and static sound sources and struggle to generalize to unheard sounds.
• In this work, we propose the novel dynamic audio-visual navigation benchmark which requires catching a moving sound source in an environment with noisy and distracting sounds, posing a range of new challenges.
• We introduce a reinforcement learning approach that learns a robust navigation policy for these complex settings.