Overview

Object-goal navigation asks a robot to locate and reach a specified object, often from a short language instruction and with only partial views of its surroundings. Approaches include reinforcement-learned policies, semantic maps and frontier exploration, and vision-language or language-model agents that plan hierarchically; many also use spatial memory to avoid repeated searches. Open-vocabulary targets, persistent maps, and real-robot tests are broadening the task beyond fixed object categories and static simulations. A central challenge is balancing reliable target grounding and safe, efficient movement with limited compute, especially when objects move, scenes change, or the robot must verify that it has truly reached the target.

Latest papers

CardsList

86 papers15 papers in the last four weeks, up 114% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. ScheNav: Schematic-Guided Object Goal Navigation

    Oct 25, 2026Guichen Huang, Chenchen Jing, Che Sun +2Robot NavigationObject-Goal Navigation

  2. CLOSER: Evidence-Aware Active Visual Verification for Embodied Object-Goal Navigation

    Oct 20, 2026Pengying Wu, Mingye Jiang, Yunze Hu +5Object-Goal NavigationVisual Robot Navigation

  3. CovNav: Conformal Prediction-Guided Adaptive Inference for Object Goal Navigation

    Oct 20, 2026Pengying Wu, Zhejia Wen, Kang Ding +5Object-Goal NavigationAdaptive Reasoning in Language Models

  4. StopWatch: Goal Grounding for Object-goal Navigation

    Oct 16, 2026Xinhao Liu, Yunsheng Tian, Yuheng Qiu +4Object-Goal NavigationVisual Grounding for Robotics

  5. F2A-ObjectNav: An Adaptive Agentic Architecture for Object-Goal Navigation

    Oct 14, 2026Seyed Ali Mirghasemi, Alireza TaheriObject-Goal NavigationEmbodied Navigation

  6. Interactive Navigation Beyond Reachability: Benchmark and Agentic Framework

    Oct 12, 2026Delun Li, Xueyao Wei, Rui Chen +4Embodied NavigationVisual Navigation

  7. Have You Seen It Clearly? Uncertainty-Guided Belief Refinement for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

    Oct 11, 2026Jingzhi Huang, Junkai Huang, Yuhang Peng +6Robot NavigationObject-Goal Navigation

  8. LERR-Nav: Learning to Coordinate Exploration, Recovery, and Reminiscing for Object Navigation

    Oct 11, 2026Jingzhi Huang, Junkai Huang, Yuhang Peng +6Object-Goal NavigationEmbodied Navigation

  9. GG-Nav: Goal-oriented Grounding Chain-of-Thought Elicits Reasoning in Navigation Foundation Models

    Oct 10, 2026Shaohao Zhu, Wensi Huang, Siqi Zhang +6Vision-Language NavigationRobot Navigation

  10. Lifelong small-object navigation in changing object layouts: a benchmark and method

    Oct 7, 2026Jiagan Huang, Zikun Zhou, Zijian Ni +4Visual NavigationObject-Goal Navigation

  11. MarvisNav: Making Memory Visible on Route Choices for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

    Oct 5, 2026Jincheng Wang, Chi Pui Chan, Wei Zeng +3Memory-Augmented VLMsVision-Language Navigation

  12. Learning Modular Policy for Multi-Floor Object Navigation:A Factorized Framework for Diagnostic Study

    Oct 3, 2026Shichao Zhai, Shuhao Ye, Rong Xiong +1Object-Goal NavigationEmbodied Navigation

  13. AerialDojo-200K: A Large-Scale Benchmark Suite for Open-World Aerial Object-Goal Search

    Sep 28, 2026Tongtong Feng, Xin Wang, Haoran Hou +9Aerial RoboticsObject-Goal Navigation

  14. SOR-Nav: Search or Relocate? Context-Gated Exploration and Cross-Region Relocation for Object Navigation

    Sep 28, 2026Yuan Ji, Zirui Li, Yuxin Cai +3Robot NavigationObject-Goal Navigation

  15. NaviScale: Generating Large-Scale Semantic Map Datasets for Object Navigation

    Sep 23, 2026Chuanlin Lan, Yanwei Zheng, Yuxi Jing +6Robot NavigationSynthetic Data Generation for Robotics

  16. A Topological Representation with Object-Path Graphs for Open-Vocabulary Instance Navigation

    Sep 21, 2026Linwei Zheng, Daojie Peng, Bingtao Wang +2Robot NavigationOpen-Vocabulary Object Navigation

  17. HarnessVLN: Unifying Training-Free Embodied Navigation through an Agent Harness

    Sep 14, 2026Yang Chen, Lirong Che, Zhenyu Huang +7Embodied NavigationLarge Language Model-Based Robot Planning

  18. GLAM: Training a latent world model over global spatiotemporal memory for active exploration and navigation

    Sep 13, 2026I-Tak Ieong, Ruizhi Feng, Zhaoyang Lu +5Embodied NavigationLatent World Models

  19. Dual-Layer Semantic-Spatial Belief Mapping for Aerial Object Goal Navigation

    Sep 8, 2026Jianqiang Xiao, Xiang Deng, Yuexuan Sun +3UAV NavigationVision-Language Navigation

  20. OmniNav: Robust Long-Horizon Target Navigation in Dynamic Environments

    Sep 8, 2026Yujie Tang, Meiling Wang, Jinhao Jiang +4Robot NavigationObject-Goal Navigation

  21. STEGNav: Spatio-Temporal Event Graph Reasoning for Multimodal Lifelong Object Navigation

    Aug 28, 2026Yang Chen, Zhenyu Huang, Wenbo Fu +4Vision-Language NavigationObject-Goal Navigation

  22. Spatial-Semantic Reasoning using Large Language Models for Efficient UAV Search Operations

    Aug 28, 2026Marin Maletic, Marijana Peti, Tamara Petrovic +1UAV NavigationObject-Goal Navigation

  23. RTNav: Towards Real-Time Zero-Shot Object Navigation

    Aug 27, 2026Easop Lee, Lingyu Zhang, Boyuan ChenRobot NavigationObject-Goal Navigation

  24. Graph-MambaNav: Spatial-Temporal Graph Mamba Leveraging Object-Relation Knowledge for Object-Goal Navigation

    Aug 13, 2026Leyuan Sun, Genxin Chen, Linwei Ye +3Object-Goal NavigationSpatiotemporal GNNs

  25. AECNav: Active Evidence Consolidation for Efficient Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Object Navigation

    Aug 11, 2026Guanlin Liu, Shaobin Ling, Renyuan Liu +2Open-Vocabulary Object NavigationObject-Goal Navigation

  26. Hierarchical Fast-Slow ReAct Agent for Zero-Shot Object-Goal Navigation

    Aug 10, 2026Zhaochen Lan, Zhi Yang, Yuxiang Fu +1Cognitive Architectures for AI AgentsVision-Language Navigation

  27. LifelongCrossNav: Persistent 3D Semantic Memory for Cross-Floor Multi-Object Navigation

    Aug 7, 2026Zehui Li, Zihao Sun, Jiawei Xu +6Embodied NavigationRobot Navigation

  28. SSTG-Nav: Metric-Grounded Spatial-Semantic Topological Graphs for Reusable Object Navigation

    Aug 1, 2026Daojie Peng, Bingtao Wang, Jun MaSemantic MappingObject-Goal Navigation