This paper explores the impact of virtual guidance on mid-level representation-based navigation, where an agent performs navigation tasks based solely on visual observations. Instead of providing distance measures or numerical directions to guide the agent, which may be difficult for it to interpret visually, the paper investigates the potential of different forms of virtual guidance schemes on navigation performance. Three schemes of virtual guidance signals are explored: virtual navigation path, virtual waypoints, and a combination of both. The experiments were conducted using a virtual city built with the Unity engine to train the agents while avoiding obstacles. The results show that virtual guidance provides the agent with more meaningful navigation information and achieves better performance in terms of path completion rates and navigation efficiency. In addition, a set of analyses were provided to investigate the failure cases and the navigated trajectories, and a pilot study was conducted for the real-world scenarios.

翻译：本文探讨了虚拟引导对基于中层表征的导航任务的影响，其中智能体仅依靠视觉观测执行导航。不同于向智能体提供难以从视觉上理解的距离测量或数值方向指令，本文研究了不同形式的虚拟引导方案对导航性能的潜在作用。探索了三种虚拟引导信号方案：虚拟导航路径、虚拟航点以及两者的组合。实验采用Unity引擎构建虚拟城市环境对智能体进行训练，并实现避障功能。结果表明，虚拟引导能为智能体提供更具语义意义的导航信息，在路径完成率和导航效率方面均取得更优性能。此外，本文对失败案例和导航轨迹展开系列分析，并针对真实场景进行了初步实验研究。