Translating Navigation Instructions in Natural Language to a High-Level Plan for Behavioral Robot Navigation

Xiaoxue Zang, Ashwini Pokle, Marynel Vázquez, Kevin Chen, Juan Carlos Niebles, Alvaro Soto, Silvio Savarese

Abstract: We propose an end-to-end deep learning model for translating free-form natural language instructions to a high-level plan for behavioral robot navigation. We use attention models to connect information from both the user instructions and a topological representation of the environment. We evaluate our model's performance on a new dataset containing 10,050 pairs of navigation instructions. Our model significantly outperforms baseline approaches. Furthermore, our results suggest that it is possible to leverage the environment map as a relevant knowledge base to facilitate the translation of free-form navigational instruction.