Facebook is training robot assistants to hear as well as see

The algorithms build on FAIR's work in January of this year, when an agent was trained in Habitat to navigate unfamiliar environments without a map. Using just a depth-sensing camera, GPS, and compass data, it learned to enter a space much as a human would, and find the shortest possible path to its destination without wrong turns, backtracking, or exploration. The first of these new algorithms can now build a map of the space at the same time, allowing it to remember the environment and navigate through it faster if it returns. The second improves the agent's ability to map the space without needing to visit every part of it. Having been trained on enough virtual environments, it is able to anticipate certain features in a new one; it can know, for example, that there is likely to be empty floor space behind a kitchen island without navigating to the other side to look.