低コストロボットナビゲーションにおける効率的なSim-to-Real転移のためのデュアル変分オートエンコーダ
Dual Variational Autoencoders for Efficient Sim-to-Real Transfer in Low-Cost Robotic Navigation
シミュレーションと実世界の画像をデュアルVAEで共通潜在空間に整列させ、低コストロボットの屋内ナビゲーションを約91%の成功率で実現した。
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著者: Álvaro Díez, Fidel Aznar
分類: cs.RO, cs.CV, cs.LG
原文アブストラクト
Vision-based autonomous navigation for low-cost robots remains a fundamental challenge, primarily due to the significant gap between simulated training environments and real-world operational conditions. Direct policy transfer from simulation is often ineffective, while training exclusively on real data is impractical. We propose a hybrid transfer learning framework that effectively bridges the sim-to-real gap by combining domain randomization with feature-level domain adaptation. Our method employs a dual convolutional variational autoencoder architecture with a shared decoder, trained on an extensive set of 45225 simulated images and a minimal set of only 4556 real-world samples. This architecture learns a compact, common latent representation space that aligns the distributions of both domains. The adaptation process is further enhanced by two complementary data augmentation techniques designed to expand the limited real-world data. Experimental evaluation demonstrates that our method achieves an average success rate of almost 91% on image classification tasks for real-world indoor navigation, significantly outperforming both simulation-only and real-world-only training. We validate these findings through a direct, real-world deployment, where the proposed policy successfully guides a low-cost robot in a reactive exploration task. Furthermore, we validate the model's efficiency through a rigorous computational estimation, confirming its suitability for resource-constrained embedded platforms such as the Raspberry Pi 4 and NVIDIA Jetson Nano. This work presents a practical solution for developing effective and efficient navigation policies for low-cost robotic systems.