Embodied Agents for Efficient Exploration and Smart Scene Description

The development of embodied agents that can communicate with humans in natural language has gained increasing interest over the last years, as it facilitates the diffusion of robotic platforms in human-populated environments. As a step towards this objective, in this work, we tackle a setting for visual navigation in which an autonomous agent needs to explore and map an unseen indoor environment while portraying interesting scenes with natural language descriptions. To this end, we propose and evaluate an approach that combines recent advances in visual robotic exploration and image captioning on images generated through agent-environment interaction. Our approach can generate smart scene descriptions that maximize semantic knowledge of the environment and avoid repetitions. Further, such descriptions offer user-understandable insights into the robot's representation of the environment by high-lighting the prominent objects and the correlation between them as encountered during the exploration. To quantitatively assess the performance of the proposed approach, we also devise a specific score that takes into account both exploration and description skills. The experiments carried out on both photorealistic simulated environments and real-world ones demonstrate that our approach can effectively describe the robot's point of view during exploration, improving the human-friendly interpretability of its observations.