CanonNav: Disentangling Navigation Behavior from Camera Geometry in Cross-Platform Visual Navigation
Authors: Dong-Wook Kim, Ji-Hoon Hwang, E-In Son, Mintaek Oh, Seung-Woo Seo
Organizations: Seoul National University, Republic of Korea
Abstract
While visual navigation has advanced through imitation learning from cross-platform demonstrations, fully leveraging such data remains challenging. First, directly learning from image-trajectory pairs entangles navigation behavior with platform-dependent camera geometry. This hinders consistent learning by forcing the policy to implicitly infer camera geometry from visual observations, an inherently ill-posed problem. Second, imitation learning from demonstrated trajectories captures the expert's chosen motion but leaves the intermediate decisions underlying that motion implicit. To address these issues, we propose CanonNav, a visual navigation framework that disentangles navigation behavior from camera geometry and incorporates complementary planning supervision into learning from cross-platform demonstrations. CanonNav introduces camera geometry canonicalization, which transforms visual observations and trajectories into a camera-consistent representation space. Building on this representation, we derive safety and local-progress supervision using pseudo-labels from an offline traversability estimator. Safety supervision penalizes unsafe trajectories, while local-progress supervision guides where the robot should advance. Experiments across diverse camera configurations and environments show that, despite using only RGB at inference, CanonNav consistently outperforms RGB-based baselines and even surpasses RGB-D-based methods in challenging scenarios.
Learning-based visual navigation has enhanced semantic goal-reaching capabilities. However, due to their black-box nature, purely end-to-end models often lack explicit geometric constraints, leading to unpredictable and unreliable obstacle avoidance in open environments. Conversely, traditional geometric planners ensure safety but struggle with high-dimensional visual targets. To address these limitations, we propose SemGeoNav, a novel hierarchical visual navigation framework.It tightly integrates the high-level semantic reasoning of end-to-end models with the reliable local planning ability of geometry-based methods, achieving robust image-based navigation while significantly improving obstacle avoidance. Furthermore, we introduce a temporal trajectory smoothing mechanism to ensure continuous and stable robot motion. We evaluated SemGeoNav on a Unitree Go2 quadruped robot in real-world environments. The results demonstrate that SemGeoNav outperforms existing representative methods, including ViNT and NoMaD, achieving higher success rates and shorter navigation times.
We present LoTIS, a model for visual navigation that provides robot-agnostic image-space guidance by localizing a reference RGB trajectory in the robot's current view, without requiring camera calibration, poses, or robot-specific training. Instead of predicting actions tied to specific robots, we predict the image-space coordinates of the reference trajectory as they would appear in the robot's current view. This creates robot-agnostic visual guidance that easily integrates with local planning. Consequently, our model's predictions provide guidance zero-shot across diverse embodiments. By decoupling perception from action and learning to localize trajectory points rather than imitate behavioral priors, we enable a cross-trajectory training strategy for robustness to viewpoint and camera changes. We outperform state-of-the-art methods by 20-50 percentage points in success rate on conventional forward navigation, achieving 94-98% success rate across diverse sim and real environments. Furthermore, we achieve over 5x improvements on challenging tasks where baselines fail, such as backward traversal. The system is straightforward to use: we show how even a video from a phone camera directly enables different robots to navigate to any point on the trajectory. Videos, demo, and code are available at https://finnbusch.com/lotis.
Vision-based navigation models, particularly foundation models, generate viable trajectories from RGB observations alone. However, even state-of-the-art transformer- and diffusion-based policies struggle to generalize in unfamiliar deployment environments containing unseen obstacles or shifted conditions. The resulting trajectories often remain goal-directed but unsafe. Existing efforts improve safety through external trajectory correction or internal geometric priors, yet the resulting policies are not trained to explicitly represent obstacle boundaries or traversable free-space structure. To address this, we propose a navigation model that incorporates these structures directly into the policy via fine-tuning and is designed to be compatible with diverse RGB-based backbones. Across multiple robot platforms, indoor environments, and static and dynamic obstacle scenarios, our method reduces collision frequency relative to ViNT, NoMaD, and their CARE-augmented variants while maintaining goal-reaching performance.