Navigating to Objects in Unseen Environments by Distance Prediction

Understand

Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) task is to navigate an agent to an object category in unseen environments without a pre-built map.

• In this paper, we solve this task by predicting the distance to the target using semantically-related objects as cues.
• Based on the estimated distance to the target object, our method directly choose optimal mid-term goals that are more likely to have a shorter path to the target.
• Specifically, based on the learned knowledge, our model takes a bird's-eye view semantic map as input, and estimates the path length from the frontier map cells to the target object.