Robot Navigation

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Overview

Robot navigation combines sensing and localization with route planning and motion control, from indoor mobile robots and legged platforms to drones, vehicles, and medical devices. Common approaches include SLAM and geometric planners such as A* and model-predictive control, alongside reinforcement learning, imitation learning, and vision-language policies that use semantic maps, memory, or predicted futures. Methods are tested in simulation and on physical robots, with benchmarks such as Habitat HM3D and MP3D for object navigation and R2R-CE for language-guided routes. A central challenge is making long-horizon decisions that remain safe and efficient when perception is uncertain, environments change, and policies transfer from simulation to real robots.

Latest papers

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557 papers103 papers in the last four weeks, up 29% on the four weeks before. 0.6% of all new papers.

  1. Don't Risk It!: Trajectory-Conditioned Distributional Risk for LiDAR-Only Crowd Navigation

    Oct 29, 2026Mathai Mathew Pulicken, Laksh Nanwani, Basant Sharma +3Robot NavigationSafe Robot Navigation

    Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad, India. · University of Tartu, Estonia. · Inria, Université de Lorraine, France.

  2. Teaching a Tree to Recover: Online Distillation of an LLM Supervisor with Counterfactual Replay

    Oct 29, 2026Kristian Ceder, Kilian Freitag, Knut ÅkessonRobot Failure RecoveryRobot Navigation

    Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden

  3. A Multi-Layer Navigation System for Smart Wheelchairs with a Limited Input Interface

    Oct 28, 2026Piero Simonetto, Anna Polato, Francesco Pasti +6Robot NavigationSafe Robot Navigation

    Department of Information Engineering, University of Padova, Italy · Ca’ Foscari University of Venice · European Centre for Living Technology +1

  4. Remember Where You Walk: Learning Spatial Memory for End-to-End Legged Robot Exploration

    Oct 27, 2026Leon Magnus, Nico Bohlinger, Jan Peters +1Robotic Spatial MemoryMemory-Augmented RL

    Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. · Robotics Institute Germany (RIG). · German Research Center for AI (DFKI).

  5. RAVEN: A Unified Active SLAM System for Rapid Autonomous Visual Exploration with Aerial Robots under Localization Uncertainty

    Oct 27, 2026Xinyi Chen, Yichen Zhang, Chenxing Jiang +1Simultaneous Localization and MappingAutonomous Robot Exploration

    Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

  6. Gradient flow of magnetic inclination and intensity as a GPS-free guidance mechanism

    Oct 27, 2026Zayed Herma, Philippe Cardin, Andréa VassilevRobot NavigationGNSS-Denied Localization

    Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CEA, Leti, 38000 Grenoble, France · Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, ISTerre, 38000 Grenoble, France

  7. REACH: An RL-based Hierarchical Humanoid Crawling Framework for Adaptable Confined Space Traversal

    Oct 27, 2026Shengzhang Xu, Yuning Guo, Weiyi Hu +3Humanoid Robot LocomotionRL for Legged Locomotion

    Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China · Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

  8. OmniBrain-0: A Unified Agentic Model for Embodied Intelligence

    Oct 26, 2026Xiaomi Embodied Intelligence Team, Yuechen Luo, Chong He +29Embodied AIAgentic AI for Robotics

    University of Macau × Tsinghua University · University of Macau, Tsinghua University

  9. RetroNav: Scene-Grounded Retrospection and Retry for Self-Evolving Lifelong Navigation

    Oct 26, 2026Diantao Tu, Yangdong Liu, Niannian Dai +2Robot NavigationEmbodied Navigation

    Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

  10. The German Tank Problem & Navigating by Scent

    Oct 25, 2026Kordel Kade FranceRobot NavigationRobust Estimation

    Scentience, Inc.

  11. ScheNav: Schematic-Guided Object Goal Navigation

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

    Beijing Institute of Technology · Shenzhen MSU-BIT University · Zhejiang University of Technology

  12. Real-Time Human Trajectory Prediction from RGB-D for Mobile Robots Using Bi-Mamba

    Oct 24, 2026Basheer Al-Tawil, Magnus Jung, Ayoub Al-HamadiHuman Trajectory PredictionState Space Models

    Neuro Information Technology, Otto von Guericke University, 39106 Magdeburg, Germany

  13. Natural-Language to Nav2: Operational Policies for Costmap-Based Navigation

    Oct 23, 2026Jiyeong Chae, Hyunkyo Seo, Heonjae Lee +1Robot NavigationLanguage-Conditioned Robot Planning

    Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST) 333 Techno Jungang-daero, Hyeonpung-eup, Dalseong-gun, Daegu, 42988, Republic of Korea

  14. Object- and Task-Aware Active Perception for Safe Navigation of Mobile Manipulators in Semi-Static Environments

    Oct 21, 2026Jingxing Qian, Xintong Du, Jun Yang +3Safe Robot NavigationRobot Navigation

    University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) and the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Canada. · Epson Canada Ltd., Toronto, ON L3R 6G3, Canada. · Learning Systems and Robotics Lab at the Technical University of Munich and the Munich Institute for Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Germany. +2

  15. RangeNav: Task-Aligned LiDAR Range-Image Pretraining for Robot Navigation

    Oct 21, 2026Samuel Foo Enze, Manthan Patel, Fan Yang +4Robot Navigation3D Representation Learning

    Robotic Systems Lab (RSL), ETH Zurich, Switzerland · NVIDIA

  16. SAFTER: Safety-Aware Filtering Through Explicit Recoverability for Robust Reinforcement Learning under Distribution Shift

    Oct 21, 2026Benedictus C. G. Cinun, Bin HuSafe RLReinforcement Learning

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77004, USA · Department of Engineering Technology, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77004, USA

  17. State-Dependent Objective Coordination for End-to-End Balance and Navigation

    Oct 21, 2026Xuhao Huang, Xitao Xu, Yuxin Zheng +2Robotic ControlRobot Navigation

  18. GGraph: A GPU-Accelerated Library for Graph-Based Robot Deployment and Learning

    Oct 20, 2026Yash Rampuria, Rohan Garg, Daniele Gammelli +1Robot LearningRobotic RL

    Stanford University, CA

  19. Navigation Explainability for Object Avoidance with LLMs for Assistive Robots

    Oct 20, 2026Courtney Young, Yi Lian, Taery Kim +1Visually Impaired Navigation AssistanceRobot Navigation

  20. Physical AI for Intralogistics: Benchmarking the NVIDIA Sim-to-Real Ecosystem for Cosmos-Enhanced COMPASS Navigation on Industrial Mobile Robots

    Oct 20, 2026Charbel Abi Hana, Rayan Zaitouni, Kameel Amareen +6Robot NavigationSim-to-Real Transfer

    Idealworks · NVIDIA

  21. Adaptive Traversal Tubes for Posture-Aware Navigation of Bipedal Humanoids

    Oct 20, 2026Zijian GeRobot NavigationSocial Robot Navigation

  22. GOFusion: Real-Time Gaussian-Occupancy Submap Fusion for Fisher-Informed Autonomous Robot Navigation

    Oct 18, 2026Boxin Bu, Simon Boche, Haoming Zhang +63DGS SLAMRobot Navigation

    Mobile Robotics Lab, Technical University of Munich and ETH Zurich. · Learning Systems & Robotics Lab, Technical University of Munich and Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI). · Human-Centered Computing and Extended Reality Lab, TUM University Hospital, Clinic for Orthopedics and Sports Orthopedics, Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI). +1

  23. Tension Tells the Tail: Cable-Obstacle Interaction Sensing for Tethered Mobile Robot Navigation

    Oct 17, 2026Ryuki Shimada, Koki Suzuki, Genya IshigamiSafe Robot NavigationRobot Navigation

    The authors are with the Space Robotics Group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Keio University, Yokohama, Kanagawa 223-8522, Japan.

  24. Rollbot 2: Agile Locomotion by a Single-Actuator Spherical Robot

    Oct 16, 2026Jingxian Wang*, Chen Yu*, Sam Kriegman +1Robot LocomotionRobot Navigation

    Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208 USA.

  25. TransNav: Transformer-Based End-to-End Navigation Method for Static and Dynamic Quadrotor Obstacle Avoidance

    Oct 16, 2026Jianghan Zhu, Zhuo Li, Yanjun Zhang +1Robot NavigationAerial Robotics

    The authors are with the State Key Laboratory of Autonomous Intelligent Unmanned Systems, School of Automation, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China

  26. Bio-Inspired Magnetic Navigation Using Gradient Descent With Rao-Blackwellized Particle Filtering

    Oct 16, 2026Zayed Herma, Andrea Vassilev, Philippe Cardin +1Robot NavigationGNSS-Denied Localization

    Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CEA, Leti, 38000 Grenoble, France · Univ. Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, ISTerre, 38000 Grenoble, France

  27. PASS-VLN: Passability-Aware Local-Command Vision-and-Language Navigation

    Oct 16, 2026Cong Zou, Xiangsheng Shi, Xuanhui Wang +4Robot NavigationVision-Language Navigation

    Qiyuan Lab, Beijing, China. · Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

  28. ChairNav: Cross-Embodiment Pre-training and Personalization for Long-Horizon Wheelchair Navigation

    Oct 15, 2026Junhua Huang, Zhizheng Liu, Honglin He +2Robot NavigationAssistive Robotics

    University of California, Los Angeles · Louisiana State University

  29. AVALON: Zero-Shot Indoor Navigation with Human-Seeded Topological Memory

    Oct 15, 2026Jing Xia, Changyan Li, Yuduo Wang +5Robot NavigationIndoor Robot Navigation

    Department of Data and Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.

  30. MuSTMM: Learning Sound-Triggered Mobile Manipulation across Multiple Scenes

    Oct 15, 2026Hao Ju, Feng Yan, Zhihao Zhong +3Robotic Spatial MemoryMobile Manipulation

    University of Macau · Enacta-AI · Hefei University of Technology