Learning Minimal Representations for Visual Navigation and Recognition II

想想看，你如何找到去杂货店的路，如何了解一个新商场的布局，或者科学家如何制造一个可以在火星表面导航的机器人。人、动物和机器人必须在复杂的环境中导航，但在不同的情况下应用不同的策略。人们可以像蚂蚁一样通过航位推算到达杂货店，像蜜蜂一样跟随地标，或者可以使用精确的环境“记忆地图”。此外，巧妙的策略组合可以让你更容易找到出路。目前的研究工作特别探讨了如何将这些策略整合起来，以实现强大的视觉导航。在国家科学基金会的支持下，迈克尔·塔尔博士和威廉·沃伦博士研究人们如何学习新环境的布局，由此产生的空间知识的几何形状，以及如何使用它来导航。他们方法的独特之处在于研究人们在计算机生成的虚拟环境中行走时的实际导航行为（VENLab -参见http://www.cog.brown.edu/Research/ven_lab/）。参与者戴上头戴式虚拟现实显示器，在40 x 40英尺的区域内自由行走。他们的一举一动都被天花板上的跟踪系统记录下来。在参与者了解了布局之后，环境可以秘密地改变，他们必须找到一条通往杂货店的新路线。通过扭曲虚拟世界或改变地标的属性，这些科学家决定了人们使用的导航策略，以及他们如何依赖路线、地标和空间几何。

Consider how you find your way to the grocery store or learn the layout of a new mall, or how scientists might build a robot that can be dropped on Mars to navigate its surface. People, animals, and robots must navigate complex environments, but different strategies are applied in different situations. One may get to the grocery store by dead reckoning like ants, following landmarks like honeybees, or one can use a precise "memory map" of the environment. Moreover, clever combinations of strategies can make it easier to find the way. The present research effort specifically explores how these strategies are integrated to allow robust visual navigation.With NSF support, Dr. Michael Tarr and Dr. William Warren study how people learn the layout of new environments, the geometry of the resulting spatial knowledge, and how it is used to navigate. The uniqueness of their approach is to study actual navigation behavior, as people actively walk through a computer-generated virtual environment (the VENLab - see http://www.cog.brown.edu/Research/ven_lab/ ). Participants wear a head-mounted virtual reality display and walk freely in a 40 x 40 ft area. Their movements are recorded by a tracking system in the ceiling. After participants learn the layout, the environment can be surreptitiously changed, and they must, in effect, find a new route to the grocery store. By distorting the virtual world or changing the properties of landmarks, these scientists determine the navigational strategies people use and how they rely on routes, landmarks, and the geometry of space.