  A crucial ability of mobile intelligent agents is to integrate the evidence
from multiple sensory inputs in an environment and to make a sequence of
actions to reach their goals. In this paper, we attempt to approach the problem
of Audio-Visual Embodied Navigation, the task of planning the shortest path
from a random starting location in a scene to the sound source in an indoor
environment, given only raw egocentric visual and audio sensory data. To
accomplish this task, the agent is required to learn from various modalities,
i.e. relating the audio signal to the visual environment. Here we describe an
approach to audio-visual embodied navigation that takes advantage of both
visual and audio pieces of evidence. Our solution is based on three key ideas:
a visual perception mapper module that constructs its spatial memory of the
environment, a sound perception module that infers the relative location of the
sound source from the agent, and a dynamic path planner that plans a sequence
of actions based on the audio-visual observations and the spatial memory of the
environment to navigate toward the goal. Experimental results on a newly
collected Visual-Audio-Room dataset using the simulated multi-modal environment
demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach over several competitive
baselines.
