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arXiv · 2412.20226

Embodiment-Agnostic Navigation Policy Trained with Visual Demonstrations

Nimrod Curtis·Osher Azulay·Avishai Sintov
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Abstract

Learning to navigate in unstructured environments is a challenging task for robots. While reinforcement learning can be effective, it often requires extensive data collection and can pose risk. Learning from expert demonstrations, on the other hand, offers a more efficient approach. However, many existing methods rely on specific robot embodiments, pre-specified target images and require large datasets. We propose the Visual Demonstration-based Embodiment-agnostic Navigation (ViDEN) framework, a novel framework that leverages visual demonstrations to train embodiment-agnostic navigation policies. ViDEN utilizes depth images to reduce input dimensionality and relies on relative target positions, making it more adaptable to diverse environments. By training a diffusion-based policy on task-centric and embodiment-agnostic demonstrations, ViDEN can generate collision-free and adaptive trajectories in real-time. Our experiments on human reaching and tracking demonstrate that ViDEN outperforms existing methods, requiring a small amount of data and achieving superior performance in various indoor and outdoor navigation scenarios. Project website: https://nimicurtis.github.io/ViDEN/.

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Nimrod Curtis, Osher Azulay, Avishai Sintov. 2024-12-28. Embodiment-Agnostic Navigation Policy Trained with Visual Demonstrations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20226

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