Deepmind teaches AI to follow navigational directions like humans

Since it’s a bad idea to just let driverless cars loose on the roads, the company uses this environment to train AI to navigate a city without using a map or relying on any other knowledge.Last year the AI could get from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ by zooming around the images until it found the place it was looking for. This isn’t useful unless your idea of a fun taxi ride is the navigational equivalent of hitting the random button on your Spotify play list.Now Deepmind‘s come up with a frame work by which AI can follow directions to navigate Street View. The team created what’s called the StreetNav training environment and developed several tasks by which an AI can be trained to navigate within the environment.The researchers trained the AI on certain areas of New York City. What Deepmind is doing is a concocting a general approach to common sense navigation for driverless cars.There’s currently no framework by which you can hop in a driverless taxi and get results by saying “I don’t know the address, but I can tell you how to get there from here.” Before that can happen on real roads, someone has to teach it how to follow directions in the lab.Unfortunately the agents didn’t perform quite as well as had been hoped.