Multi-Agent Embodied Visual Semantic Navigation With Scene Prior Knowledge

In visual semantic navigation, the robot navigates to a target object with egocentric visual observations and the class label of the target is given. It is a meaningful task inspiring a surge of relevant research. However, most of the existing models are only effective for single-agent navigation, and a single agent has low efficiency and poor fault tolerance when conducting more complicated tasks. Multi-agent collaboration can improve the efficiency and has strong application potentials. In this letter, we propose the multi-agent visual semantic navigation, in which multiple agents collaborate with others to find multiple target objects. It is a challenging task that requires agents to learn reasonable collaboration strategies to perform efficient exploration under the restrictions of communication bandwidth. We develop a hierarchical decision framework based on semantic mapping, scene prior knowledge, and communication mechanism to solve this task. The experimental results in unseen scenes with both seen objects and unseen objects illustrate the higher accuracy and efficiency of the proposed model compared with the single-agent model.