Aim My Robot: Precision Local Navigation to Any Object

Abstract

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Existing navigation systems mostly consider “success” when the robot reaches within 1 m radius to a goal. This precision is insufficient for emerging applications where a robot needs to be positioned precisely relative to an object for downstream tasks, such as docking, inspection, and manipulation. To this end, we design and implement <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Aim-My-Robot</i> (<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">AMR</i>), a local navigation system that enables a robot to reach any object in its vicinity at the desired relative pose, with <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">centimeter-level accuracy</i>. AMR achieves high accuracy and robustness by leveraging multi-modal sensors, precise action prediction, and is trained on large-scale photorealistic data generated in simulation. AMR shows strong sim2real transfer and can adapt to different robot kinematics and unseen objects with little to no fine-tuning.