Habitat Rearrangement Challenge

We propose the Habitat Rearrangement Challenge. Specifically, a virtual robot (Fetch mobile manipulator) is spawned in a previously unseen simulation environment and asked to rearrange objects from initial to desired positions -- picking/placing objects from receptacles (counter, sink, sofa, table), opening/closing containers (drawers, fridges) as necessary. The robot operates entirely from onboard sensing -- head- and arm-mounted RGB-D cameras, proprioceptive joint-position sensors (for the arm), and egomotion sensors (for the mobile base) -- and may not access any privileged state information (no prebuilt maps, no 3D models of rooms or objects, no physically-implausible sensors providing knowledge of mass, friction, articulation of containers). This is a challenging embodied AI task involving embodied perception, mobile manipulation, sequential decision making in long-horizon tasks, and (potentially) deep reinforcement and imitation learning. Developing such embodied intelligent systems is a goal of deep scientific and societal value, including practical applications in home assistant robots.