Navigation for everyday life

Past work in navigation has worked toward the goal of producing an accurate map of the environment. While no one can deny the usefulness of such a map, the ideal of producing a complete map becomes un-realistic when an agent is faced with performing real tasks. And yet an agent accomplishing recurring tasks should navigate more efficiently as time goes by. We present a system which integrates navigation, plan-ning, and vision. In this view, navigation supports the needs of a larger system as opposed to being a task in its own right. Whereas previous approaches assume an unknown and unstructured environment, we assume a structured environment whose organiza-tion is known, but whose specifics are unknown. The system is endowed with a wide range of visual capabil-ities as well as search plans for informed exploration of a simulated store constructed from real visual data. We demonstrate the agent finding items while map-ping the world. In repeatedly retrieving items, the agent’s performance improves as the learned map be-comes more useful