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.

本文研究了虚拟指导对基于中级表示的导航的影响，探讨了不同形式的虚拟指导信号在导航性能方面的潜力，并使用 Unity 引擎构建了虚拟城市进行实验，结果表明虚拟指导提供了更有意义的导航信息，提高了路径完成率和导航效率。