Fast and Robust Teach-and-Repeat Navigation Using MixVPR Visual Place Recognition*

Visual place recognition (VPR) is a key enabler of accurate localization and long-term autonomous navigation in robotics applications, such as loop closure detection for simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM). However, real-world VPR deployment relies on selecting an image matching threshold that balances precision and recall. These thresholds are typically tuned using labeled validation data and fixed during deployment, making them unreliable under environmental changes where ground truth is unavailable. This is particularly problematic in safety-critical robotics, where accepting a false loop closure can corrupt the estimated trajectory and map. In this work, we introduce Visual Place Recognition Auditing, an independent post-retrieval verification framework that leverages Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to assess retrieved matches by reasoning jointly over query and candidate images. Unlike conventional verification methods, our approach performs instance-level verification without requiring architecture-specific confidence measures, dataset-dependent thresholds, or prior knowledge of the deployment environment. We evaluate our method on six benchmark datasets using five state-of-the-art VPR methods and four VLMs. Results show that VLM-based auditing improves recall@1 by 13.6% on average as compared to state-of-the-art methods while reducing false acceptance rates to 12%, maintaining precision above 95% and coverage above 75%.

End-to-end reinforcement learning (RL) has shown strong potential for legged robot navigation, yet existing approaches commonly rely on continuously updated robot-to-goal states from external state estimation modules, leaving part of the navigation problem outside the learned policy. In this work, we seek to push the limits of end-to-end sim-to-real RL navigation by investigating whether a legged robot can internally maintain the spatial context required for long-horizon navigation. To this end, we study goal-initialized navigation, where the goal is provided only once at the beginning of an episode, with no subsequent external relative-goal updates. We present GUIDE, an end-to-end RL framework that jointly learns navigation and internal directional awareness from onboard observations. GUIDE leverages multi-frequency proprioceptive history to capture egomotion and auxiliary spatial-anchor prediction to maintain task-relevant spatial states, while temporal depth observations provide local environmental geometry. The navigation policy is trained entirely in simulation and transferred zero-shot to the real world. Across cluttered environments and structured mazes, GUIDE reliably avoids obstacles, escapes dead ends, and reaches distant goals using only onboard sensing. These results demonstrate that robust sim-to-real legged navigation can be achieved without continuously providing external robot-to-goal estimation, opening a promising direction for future research on more self-contained end-to-end navigation.

Visual Place Recognition (VPR) is fundamental to long-term robot localization and SLAM, yet current systems overwhelmingly rely on RGB input, implicitly assuming color is necessary for global place recognition. We challenge this assumption, investigating the role of chromatic information across training regimes, model architectures and standard benchmarks under real-world appearance variation. We find that grayscale matches RGB performance generally and outperforms it under severe appearance shifts where color invariance is insufficiently learned, while color provides meaningful gains only where persistent and discriminative chromatic cues are present. Across selected benchmarks, a fully gray-trained MixVPR model achieves an average 82.4% Recall@1 compared to 81.2% for its RGB counterpart. In some cases, lightweight grayscale variants with 60% fewer parameters can outperform heavier RGB models. Grayscale further offers practical advantages in storage, bandwidth and alignment with resource-constrained systems. We conclude that for global VPR where scenes vary across illumination, weather, season and setting, color contributes minimally, and grayscale alone is sufficient for reliable place recognition.