One Map to Find Them All: Real-time Open-Vocabulary Mapping for Zero-shot Multi-Object Navigation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a real-time open-vocabulary mapping approach for zero-shot multi-object navigation, enabling robots to efficiently search for multiple objects by leveraging previous knowledge and semantic uncertainty in complex environments.

Contribution

It presents a new benchmark and a reusable semantic map with probabilistic updates that improve multi-object navigation by utilizing information from prior searches.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in simulation and real-world tests.

Effective in both single and multi-object navigation tasks.

Operates in real-time on a Jetson Orin AGX.

Abstract

The capability to efficiently search for objects in complex environments is fundamental for many real-world robot applications. Recent advances in open-vocabulary vision models have resulted in semantically-informed object navigation methods that allow a robot to search for an arbitrary object without prior training. However, these zero-shot methods have so far treated the environment as unknown for each consecutive query. In this paper we introduce a new benchmark for zero-shot multi-object navigation, allowing the robot to leverage information gathered from previous searches to more efficiently find new objects. To address this problem we build a reusable open-vocabulary feature map tailored for real-time object search. We further propose a probabilistic-semantic map update that mitigates common sources of errors in semantic feature extraction and leverage this semantic uncertainty for informed multi-object exploration. We evaluate our method on a set of object navigation tasks in both simulation as well as with a real robot, running in real-time on a Jetson Orin AGX. We demonstrate that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches both on single and multi-object navigation tasks. Additional videos, code and the multi-object navigation benchmark will be available on https://finnbsch.github.io/OneMap.