Semantic Navigation

Semantic navigation focuses on enabling robots to understand and navigate environments based on the meaning of objects and locations, rather than just geometric coordinates. Current research emphasizes developing robust methods for zero-shot navigation, where robots can find objects without prior training, often leveraging vision-language models and incorporating semantic information into map representations (e.g., using cost maps or frontier maps). This field is crucial for advancing autonomous robotics, particularly in applications like assistive technologies for visually impaired individuals and deployment of robots in unstructured, real-world settings, with recent work highlighting the importance of bridging the simulation-to-reality gap for improved performance.