Navigating with Spatial Intelligence: A Survey of Scene Graph-Based Object Goal Navigation

Today, autonomous mobile robots are widely used in all walks of life. Autonomous navigation, as a basic capability of robots, has become a research hotspot. Classical navigation techniques, which rely on pre-built maps, struggle to cope with complex and dynamic environments. With the development of artificial intelligence, learning-based navigation technology have emerged. Instead of relying on pre-built maps, the agent perceives the environment and make decisions through visual observation, enabling end-to-end navigation. A key challenge is to enhance the generalization ability of the agent in unfamiliar environments. To tackle this challenge, it is necessary to endow the agent with spatial intelligence. Spatial intelligence refers to the ability of the agent to transform visual observations into insights, insights into understanding, and understanding into actions. To endow the agent with spatial intelligence, relevant research uses scene graph to represent the environment. We refer to this method as scene graph-based object goal navigation. In this paper, we concentrate on scene graph, offering formal description, computational framework of object goal navigation. We provide a comprehensive summary of the methods for constructing and applying scene graph. Additionally, we present experimental evidence that highlights the critical role of scene graph in improving navigation success. This paper also delineates promising research directions, all aimed at sharpening the focus on scene graph. Overall, this paper shows how scene graph endows the agent with spatial intelligence, aiming to promote the importance of scene graph in the field of intelligent navigation.