Mobile robots operating in human-centered environments must generate not only collision-free paths but also trajectories that follow local behavioral conventions. Conventional costmap-based navigation emphasizes geometric feasibility and often overlooks such requirements, which can result in socially inappropriate behaviors. This paper presents NORM-Nav, a zero-shot framework that integrates natural language behavioral constraints into costmap-based planning. An LLM parses each instruction into structured constraints and grounds them using real-time vision--LiDAR perception. These constraints are encoded as multi-layer costmaps that represent geometric, semantic, directional, and velocity cues and are directly compatible with standard grid-based planners. Simulation and real-world experiments indicate that NORM-Nav improves task success rates and produces trajectories closer to human references than representative baselines. The project website is available at https://ei-nav.github.io/NORM-Nav.
Social navigation requires the robot to reason and respond in complex real-world environments. While recent works attempt to incorporate human-level intelligence into robot planning using large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), end-to-end frameworks often create an unpredictable black-box, and existing instruction-following methods are not designed for full autonomy. To bridge this gap, we present G2-Nav, a novel framework that grounds abstract social reasoning and guards safe real-world deployment. Instead of asking the VLM for direct planning decisions, G2-Nav translates its semantic reasoning into a vision-language costmap with reliability and interpretability. The VLM evaluates traversable regions and social agents from open-set perception, mapping social context into the costmap. To improve real-world robustness, the VLM performs semantic verification on upstream tracking, and we introduce a high-frequency safety check to guard against system latency prior to trajectory generation. We demonstrate through real-world experiments that G2-Nav delivers safe, efficient, and socially compliant autonomous navigation in unstructured environments. Code will be made publicly available.
Natural language interaction provides an intuitive way for non-expert users to communicate with robotic platforms. However, transforming user requests into executable navigation actions remains a challenging task, requiring the integration of language understanding, environment perception, and autonomous navigation. This work presents a language-driven navigation framework that enables mobile robots to interpret user requests in natural language to move the robot to a destination and autonomously navigate towards it. The framework is composed of modular ROS 2 components that cooperate to transform natural language instructions into navigation actions. Given a natural language request referring to a target in the environment (e.g., "go to the mail box"), the system identifies the referenced object, estimates its position using RGB-D data, and generates a navigation goal, which is then executed through the ROS 2 Nav2 navigation stack. The ROS 2-based implementation facilitates portability across different robotic platforms, requiring only the configuration of the corresponding topics and services. The system is evaluated in both simulation and real-world scenarios using a TurtleBot3 Waffle and a Unitree Go2 robot with a RealSense camera. Experimental results show that the framework successfully interprets both direct commands and contextual requests, generates meaningful natural-language feedback, and navigates towards the desired target. These results demonstrate the feasibility of combining semantic perception and autonomous navigation to provide an intuitive human-robot interaction paradigm. Code will be released as open source upon acceptance.
Jose Martínez-Fajardo, Pablo Pueyo, Fernando Caballero +1
Robot navigation typically assumes an obstacle-free path exists between start and goal. In real environments, however, clutter may block all routes. We introduce Lifelong Interactive Navigation, where a mobile robot with manipulation capabilities must move objects to forge paths and complete sequential object-placement tasks. Because environment modifications persist, decisions impact future navigability and task difficulty. We propose CoReLIN, an LLM-driven constraint-based reasoning framework with active perception. CoReLIN reasons over a structured scene graph to decide which objects to relocate, where to place them, and where to explore next. A standard motion planner executes reliable navigation and manipulation primitives. To evaluate long-horizon behavior, we introduce 2 new metrics - Long-term Efficiency Score (LES), a unified metric capturing success, execution efficiency, environment optimality, captured by Price of Clutter. In ProcTHOR-10k, CoReLIN outperforms best baseline by 16% under standard metrics and LES, and transfers to real-world hardware.