Organizations: University of Colorado Denver Denver, Colorado, USA · National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), CIRES, University of Colorado Boulder Boulder, Colorado, USA
Arctic maritime navigation is becoming increasingly important as changing sea-ice conditions expand seasonal accessibility while simultaneously introducing substantial operational, environmental, and community risks. Arctic route planning is inherently a multi-criteria problem: routes that improve vessel safety or efficiency may increase exposure to sea ice, sensitive ecosystems, or nearby communities. Existing routing methods prioritize travel time, fuel use, and navigational risk, often overlooking ecological and community impacts. We introduce a human-in-the-loop, multi-agent GeoAI system for Arctic eco-navigation that integrates operational, physical, ecological, and community-related criteria within a unified routing framework. Multiple specialized agents coordinate geospatial data acquisition and preparation, multi-objective route generation, and skyline-based decision support. The ecological criteria explicitly account for exposure to sensitive areas, including Essential Fish Habitat and seal critical habitat. By considering these ecosystem impacts and potential community burdens while keeping consequential value judgments under human control, the framework supports safer, more transparent, and socially responsible Arctic navigation. Project page and code are publicly available. https://samiraat.github.io/Arctic-Eco-Navigation-Agent/, https://github.com/samiraat/Arctic-Eco-Navigation-Agent
Current navigation benchmarks focus on task success but do not capture the economic constraints essential for commercializing autonomous delivery systems. We introduce CostNav, an Economic Navigation Benchmark that evaluates physical AI agents on a cost-revenue and break-even analysis, pairing Isaac Sim's collision and cargo dynamics with industry-standard data such as Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filings and Abbreviated Injury Scale (AIS) injury reports. To our knowledge, CostNav is the first physics-grounded economic benchmark to use regulatory and financial data to quantify the gap between navigation metrics and commercial deployment, revealing that high task-success rates alone do not ensure economic viability. Evaluating seven baselines (two rule-based and five imitation-learning methods), we find no method economically viable: all yield negative contribution margins. CANVAS, using only an RGB camera and GPS, attains the highest task success and the least-negative margin among methods with non-zero Service-Level Agreement (SLA) compliance (-$28.40/run), outperforming LiDAR-equipped Nav2 w/ GPS (-$37.34/run). A sim-trained policy evaluated on a real delivery robot yields SLA compliance close to its simulation result, indicating that policy performance in CostNav's simulation transfers to real-world deployment. We challenge the community to achieve economic viability on CostNav, which scores methods by cost-revenue outcomes. All resources are available at https://github.com/worv-ai/CostNav.
Haebin Seong, Sungmin Kim, Yongjun Cho +20
University of California, Irvine · KAIST · Seoul National University
Modeling the cognitive and experiential factors of human navigation is central to deepening our understanding of human-environment interaction and to enabling safe social navigation and effective assistive wayfinding. Most existing methods focus on forecasting motions in fully observed scenes and often neglect human factors that capture how people feel and respond to space. To address this gap, we propose EgoCogNav, a multimodal egocentric navigation framework that jointly forecasts perceived path uncertainty, trajectories and head motion from egocentric video, gaze, and motion history. To facilitate research in the field, we introduce the Cognition-aware Egocentric Navigation (CEN) dataset consisting of 6 hours real-world egocentric recordings capturing diverse navigation behaviors in real-world scenarios. Experiments show that EgoCogNav learns the perceived uncertainty that strongly correlates with human-like behaviors such as scanning, hesitation, and backtracking while improving trajectory and head-motion forecasting on held-out navigation recordings.
Zhiwen Qiu, Ziang Liu, Wenqian Niu +2
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA · Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
Assistive autonomous robots operating in multi-agent environments require efficient strategies to locate specific individuals among multiple residents. Current social navigation methods focus on reactive collision avoidance and trajectory adaptation, but lack mechanisms to proactively gather information through human-robot communication. We introduce Communication-enabled Social Navigation (CommNav). In this novel task, robotic agents actively seek assistance from residents to locate target individuals by requesting information about recent sightings, locations, and movements. To evaluate CommNav, we extend Habitat 3.0 to create Habitat 3.0c, a communication-enabled variant supporting multi-human environments with information exchange protocols. Adding our communication module (COMM) to a state-of-the-art social navigation model yields a 10 percentage-point improvement in Episode Success. We further investigate the transition from structured data to natural language by evaluating models trained on LLM-generated instructions and on colloquial instructions collected from a human study. Our experiments reveal that: (i) explicit human-robot communication substantially enhances multi-person navigation performance; (ii) pre-training COMM on a communication pretext task effectively addresses the challenge of occasional interaction signals; and (iii) the navigation policy is highly robust to natural, colloquial human language, achieving an episode success statistically similar to the model using perfect structured data.