空間強化リカレントメモリによる長距離マップレスナビゲーションのためのエンドツーエンド強化学習
Spatially-Enhanced Recurrent Memory for Long-Range Mapless Navigation via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning
既存のRNNの空間記憶能力の限界を指摘し、空間記憶を強化するSRUを提案。単眼ステレオカメラを用いた長距離マップレスナビゲーションを実現し、既存RNN比で23.5%の性能向上を達成。
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著者: Fan Yang, Per Frivik, David Hoeller, Chen Wang, Cesar Cadena, Marco Hutter
分類: cs.RO
原文アブストラクト
Recent advancements in robot navigation, particularly with end-to-end learning approaches such as reinforcement learning (RL), have demonstrated strong performance. However, successful navigation still depends on two key capabilities: mapping and planning (explicitly or implicitly). Classical approaches rely on explicit mapping pipelines to register egocentric observations into a coherent map. In contrast, end-to-end learning often achieves this implicitly -- through recurrent neural networks (RNNs) that fuse current and historical observations into a latent space for planning. While existing architectures, such as LSTM and GRU, can capture temporal dependencies, our findings reveal a critical limitation: their inability to effectively perform spatial memorization. This capability is essential for integrating sequential observations from varying perspectives to build spatial representations that support planning. To address this, we propose Spatially-Enhanced Recurrent Units (SRUs) -- a simple yet effective modification to existing RNNs -- that enhance spatial memorization. We further introduce an attention-based network architecture integrated with SRUs, enabling long-range mapless navigation using a single forward-facing stereo camera. We also employ regularization techniques to facilitate robust end-to-end recurrent training via RL. Experimental results show 23.5% overall improvement in long-range navigation compared to existing RNNs. With SRU memory, our method outperforms RL baselines -- one relying on explicit mapping and the other on stacked historical observations -- by 29.6% and 105.0%, respectively, across diverse environments requiring long-horizon mapping and memorization. Finally, we address the sim-to-real gap by leveraging large-scale pretraining on synthetic depth data, enabling zero-shot transfer for deployment across diverse and complex real-world environments.
