An ever-changing room of Ikea furniture could help AI navigate the world

The lab has designed an easily reconfigurable room, the size of a cramped studio, to be the staging ground for all 14 apartment variations. It has also re-created identical virtual replicas in Unity, a popular video-game engine--as well as 75 other configurations--that have all been open-sourced online. Together, these 89 total configurations will offer realistic simulation environments for teams around the world to train and test their navigation algorithms. The environments also come pre-loaded with models of AI2's robots and mirror real-world physics like gravity and light reflections as closely as possible.