# Long Range Neural Navigation Policies for the Real World

## TL;DR

This paper introduces NavNet, a neural navigation policy enabling real-world deployment by combining high-level visual understanding and low-level control, trained on environment scans and tested successfully in large office spaces.

## Contribution

The paper presents NavNet, a novel two-level neural navigation system designed for real-world robot deployment, bridging the gap between simulation and real environment performance.

## Key findings

- Achieved 80% success rate in long navigation tasks in real office environments.
- Outperformed SLAM-based models in the same navigation settings.
- Demonstrated effective training using environment scans for real-world deployment.

## Abstract

Learned Neural Network based policies have shown promising results for robot navigation. However, most of these approaches fall short of being used on a real robot due to the extensive simulated training they require. These simulations lack the visuals and dynamics of the real world, which makes it infeasible to deploy on a real robot. We present a novel Neural Net based policy, NavNet, which allows for easy deployment on a real robot. It consists of two sub policies -- a high level policy which can understand real images and perform long range planning expressed in high level commands; a low level policy that can translate the long range plan into low level commands on a specific platform in a safe and robust manner. For every new deployment, the high level policy is trained on an easily obtainable scan of the environment modeling its visuals and layout. We detail the design of such an environment and how one can use it for training a final navigation policy. Further, we demonstrate a learned low-level policy. We deploy the model in a large office building and test it extensively, achieving $0.80$ success rate over long navigation runs and outperforming SLAM-based models in the same settings.