FloVerse: Floor Plan-Guided Multi-Modal Navigation

Embodied navigation requires agents to translate heterogeneous goals and visual observations into actions across tasks, environments, and robot embodiments. Modern vision-language models (VLMs) already encode spatial priors for visual grounding, spatial reasoning, and pointing, but these capabilities are rarely elicited directly for robot control. Existing navigation systems instead rely on task- or embodiment-specific components, fragmenting perception, reasoning, and action while offering limited generalization. Here we present LightNav-0, a compact generalist embodied navigation model that elicits the spatial intelligence of a pretrained VLM and aligns it with navigation, without task-specific prediction heads. LightNav-0 represents diverse navigation tasks through a unified token interface: dual-channel pointing expresses task-, scene-, and embodiment-agnostic spatial intent, while a residual vector-quantized action tokenizer maps this intent to precise, embodiment-specific trajectories. Together with temporally aware visual history compression, ER mid-training, supervised fine-tuning, and reinforcement learning, this formulation supports instruction following, open-vocabulary object navigation, and visual tracking within a single model. The navigation training corpus spans 2K+ scenes and 4K+ hours of embodied navigation data. LightNav-ER, the embodied-reasoning checkpoint used to initialize LightNav-0, attains the highest complete-set average across 8 embodied-reasoning benchmarks, while LightNav-0 achieves state-of-the-art monocular success rates across all 10 public navigation simulation settings. Real-world evaluations further demonstrate zero-shot generalization across robot embodiments, diverse scenes, and static and dynamic targets. These results establish compact VLMs as a unified and transferable backbone for generalist embodied navigation.

Zero-shot Object Navigation (ZSON) has shown promise for open-vocabulary target search in unseen environments, yet most existing systems remain tied to planar representations and single-floor assumptions. These assumptions become inadequate in real buildings, where navigation involves floors, stairs, landings, and vertically overlapping spaces. This article presents TravExplorer, a cross-floor embodied exploration framework that couples zero-shot semantic guidance with traversability-aware 3-D planning. TravExplorer maintains a unified volumetric map that distinguishes occupied structures from robot-reachable support surfaces and extracts traversable frontiers from connected support surfaces, including floors, stairs, and landings. A FOV-aware active perception strategy further resolves incomplete observations during cross-floor traversal. To reduce semantic-reasoning latency, a lightweight guidance module aligns a probabilistic instance map from online open-vocabulary segmentation with a spatial value map from fast image-to-text matching. Based on these geometric and semantic memories, a hierarchical planner performs target-aware frontier touring over object hypotheses, traversable frontiers, and stair landmarks, and generates executable cross-floor motions through foothold-guided 3-D search and vertically constrained local trajectory optimization. Experiments over 4,195 simulated episodes on HM3D and MP3D demonstrate consistent advantages over representative ObjectNav baselines. Fifty real-world trials on a Unitree Go2 further validate open-vocabulary target search across single-floor and cross-floor indoor environments without prior maps or human intervention. The code will be released at https://github.com/wuyi2121/TravExplorer.

Cross-embodiment navigation is a key challenge in embodied intelligence. Due to differences in embodiment, the same visual observation may imply different actions for different agents, making prediction ambiguous when relying solely on vision. Existing studies mainly rely on reinforcement learning, which requires large-scale interaction and careful reward design, making it difficult to support scalable pretraining and real-world adaptation. In contrast, imitation-learning-based approaches remain limited. To address these challenges, we propose an imitation-learning-based embodiment-aware navigation framework with a modular multi-stage design. In pretraining, we construct a cross-embodiment navigation dataset from Internet videos and introduce embodiment geometry as conditional tokens to reduce action ambiguity under the same observation. In fine-tuning, we design a multimodal information injection mechanism based on a decoupled architecture. Specifically, we design a trajectory augmentation strategy to generate high-risk samples, which are used to train spatial perception and risk-aware correction separately, thereby explicitly incorporating embodiment geometry for safe navigation. Experimental results show that the proposed method effectively improves navigation performance across different embodiment settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of incorporating embodiment geometry into embodied navigation.