RE-MOVE: An Adaptive Policy Design for Robotic Navigation Tasks in Dynamic Environments via Language-Based Feedback

Abstract

Reinforcement learning-based policies for continuous control robotic navigation tasks often fail to adapt to changes in the environment during real-time deployment, which may result in catastrophic failures. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach called RE-MOVE (REquest help and MOVE on) to adapt already trained policy to real-time changes in the environment without re-training via utilizing a language-based feedback. The proposed approach essentially boils down to addressing two main challenges of (1) when to ask for feedback and, if received, (2) how to incorporate feedback into trained policies. RE-MOVE incorporates an epistemic uncertainty-based framework to determine the optimal time to request instructions-based feedback. For the second challenge, we employ a zero-shot learning natural language processing (NLP) paradigm with efficient, prompt design and leverage state-of-the-art GPT-3.5, Llama-2 language models. To show the efficacy of the proposed approach, we performed extensive synthetic and real-world evaluations in several test-time dynamic navigation scenarios. Utilizing RE-MOVE result in up to 80% enhancement in the attainment of successful goals, coupled with a reduction of 13.50% in the normalized trajectory length, as compared to alternative approaches, particularly in demanding real-world environments with perceptual challenges.