Right Place, Right Time! Generalizing ObjectNav to Dynamic Environments with Portable Targets (2403.09905v2)

Abstract: ObjectNav is a popular task in Embodied AI, where an agent navigates to a target object in an unseen environment. Prior literature makes the assumption of a static environment with stationary objects, which lacks realism. To address this, we present a novel formulation to generalize ObjectNav to dynamic environments with non-stationary objects, and refer to it as Portable ObjectNav or P-ObjectNav. In our formulation, we first address several challenging issues with dynamizing existing topological scene graphs by developing a novel method that introduces multiple transition behaviors to portable objects in the scene. We use this technique to dynamize Matterport3D, a popular simulator for evaluating embodied tasks. We then present a benchmark for P-ObjectNav using a combination of heuristic, reinforcement learning, and LLM-based navigation approaches on the dynamized environment, while introducing novel evaluation metrics tailored for our task. Our work fundamentally challenges the "static-environment" notion of prior ObjectNav work; the code and dataset for P-ObjectNav will be made publicly available to foster research on embodied navigation in dynamic scenes. We provide an anonymized repository for our code and dataset: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/PObjectNav-1C6D.