A Closed-Loop Perception, Decision-Making and Reasoning Mechanism for Human-Like Navigation

A Closed-Loop Perception, Decision-Making and Reasoning Mechanism for Human-Like Navigation

Wenqi Zhang, Kai Zhao, Peng Li, Xiao Zhu, Yongliang Shen, Yanna Ma, Yingfeng Chen, Weiming Lu

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 4717-4724. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/654

Reliable navigation systems have a wide range of applications in robotics and autonomous driving. Current approaches employ an open-loop process that converts sensor inputs directly into actions. However, these open-loop schemes are challenging to handle complex and dynamic real-world scenarios due to their poor generalization. Imitating human navigation, we add a reasoning process to convert actions back to internal latent states, forming a two-stage closed loop of perception, decision-making, and reasoning. Firstly, VAE-Enhanced Demonstration Learning endows the model with the understanding of basic navigation rules. Then, two dual processes in RL-Enhanced Interaction Learning generate reward feedback for each other and collectively enhance obstacle avoidance capability. The reasoning model can substantially promote generalization and robustness, and facilitate the deployment of the algorithm to real-world robots without elaborate transfers. Experiments show our method is more adaptable to novel scenarios compared with state-of-the-art approaches.
Keywords:
Robotics: Applications
Machine Learning: Deep Reinforcement Learning
Robotics: Learning in Robotics
Robotics: Motion and Path Planning