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.

Mar 15, 2026

eNavi: Event-based Imitation Policies for Low-Light Indoor Mobile Robot Navigation

Event cameras provide high dynamic range and microsecond-level temporal resolution, making them well-suited for indoor robot navigation, where conventional RGB cameras degrade under fast motion or low-light conditions. Despite advances in event-based perception spanning detection, SLAM, and pose estimation, there remains limited research on end-to-end control policies that exploit the asynchronous nature of event streams. To address this gap, we introduce a real-world indoor person-following dataset collected using a TurtleBot 2 robot, featuring synchronized raw event streams, RGB frames, and expert control actions across multiple indoor maps, trajectories under both normal and low-light conditions. We further build a multimodal data preprocessing pipeline that temporally aligns event and RGB observations while reconstructing ground-truth actions from odometry to support high-quality imitation learning. Building on this dataset, we propose a late-fusion RGB-Event navigation policy that combines dual MobileNet encoders with a transformer-based fusion module trained via behavioral cloning. A systematic evaluation of RGB-only, Event-only, and RGB-Event fusion models across 12 training variations ranging from single-path imitation to general multi-path imitation shows that policies incorporating event data, particularly the fusion model, achieve improved robustness and lower action prediction error, especially in unseen low-light conditions where RGB-only models fail. We release the dataset, synchronization pipeline, and trained models at https://eventbasedvision.github.io/eNavi/

Prithvi Jai Ramesh, Kaustav Chanda, Krishna Vinod +3

School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA.

RGB-Event Sensor FusionRobot NavigationRobot Imitation LearningEvent-Based VisionMultimodal Fusion
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Mar 15, 2026

Navigation beyond Wayfinding: Robots Collaborating with Visually Impaired Users for Environmental Interactions

Robotic guidance systems have shown promise in supporting blind and visually impaired (BVI) individuals with wayfinding and obstacle avoidance. However, most existing systems assume a clear path and do not support a critical aspect of navigation - environmental interactions that require manipulating objects to enable movement. These interactions are challenging for a human-robot pair because they demand (i) precise localization and manipulation of interaction targets (e.g., pressing elevator buttons) and (ii) dynamic coordination between the user's and robot's movements (e.g., pulling out a chair to sit). We present a collaborative human-robot approach that combines our robotic guide dog's precise sensing and localization capabilities with the user's ability to perform physical manipulation. The system alternates between two modes: lead mode, where the robot detects and guides the user to the target, and adaptation mode, where the robot adjusts its motion as the user interacts with the environment (e.g., opening a door). Evaluation results show that our system enables navigation that is safer, smoother, and more efficient than both a traditional white cane and a non-adaptive guiding system, with the performance gap widening as tasks demand higher precision in locating interaction targets. These findings highlight the promise of human-robot collaboration in advancing assistive technologies toward more generalizable and realistic navigation support.

Shaojun Cai, Nuwan Janaka, Ashwin Ram +4

National University of Singapore Singapore Singapore · City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong China · Saarland University Saarbrücken Germany +3

Visually Impaired Navigation AssistanceAssistive RoboticsRobot NavigationHuman-Robot Collaboration
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Mar 14, 2026

LineMaster Pro: A Low-Cost Intelligent Line Following Robot with PID Control and Ultrasonic Obstacle Avoidance for Educational Robotics

Line following robots are fundamental platforms in robotics education, yet commercially available solutions remain prohibitively expensive (150−300150-300) while lacking integrated obstacle detection capabilities essential for real-world applications. This paper presents LineMaster Pro, an intelligent low-cost line following robot implemented on an Arduino Nano platform that integrates dual TCRT5000 infrared sensors for precision line tracking, an HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensor for real-time obstacle detection, a digitally tuned PID controller with Ziegler-Nichols optimization, and a hierarchical finite state machine for robust obstacle avoidance. A systematic four-phase sensor calibration methodology ensures reliable operation across varying lighting and surface conditions. Experimental validation through 200 controlled trials and 72-hour continuous operation demonstrates mean tracking accuracy of 1.18 cm at 0.4 m/s (95% CI [1.06, 1.30]), obstacle detection reliability of 96.7% within 10-40 cm range with 0.7% false positive rate, and 94% successful recovery from path deviations. The PID implementation achieves 43% improvement over conventional on-off control (p<0.001p<0.001). At a total hardware cost of $28.50 based on verified Bangladesh market prices, LineMaster Pro achieves a 94% cost reduction compared to commercial alternatives, establishing a practical benchmark for accessible robotics education in resource-constrained environments.

Jeni Shahi, Abhishek Shah, A. S. M. Ahsanul Sarkar Akib

Department of Nursing (BSc), University of Nicosia, Nicosia, Cyprus · Central Department of Social Work, Tribhuvan University, Kathmandu, Nepal · Department of Robotics, Robo Tech Valley, Dhaka, Bangladesh

Robot NavigationRobotics EducationFeedback Control
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Mar 14, 2026

Path-conditioned Reinforcement Learning-based Local Planning for Long-Range Navigation

Long-range navigation is commonly addressed through hierarchical pipelines in which a global planner generates a path, decomposed into waypoints, and followed sequentially by a local planner. These systems are sensitive to global path quality, as inaccurate remote sensing data can result in locally infeasible waypoints, which degrade local execution. At the same time, the limited global context available to the local planner hinders long-range efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a reinforcement learning-based local navigation policy that leverages path information as contextual guidance. The policy is conditioned on reference path observations and trained with a reward function mainly based on goal-reaching objectives, without any explicit path-following reward. Through this implicit conditioning, the policy learns to opportunistically exploit path information while remaining robust to misleading or degraded guidance. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves navigation efficiency when high-quality paths are available and maintains baseline-level performance when path observations are severely degraded or even non-existent. These properties make the method particularly well-suited for long-range navigation scenarios in which high-level plans are approximate and local execution must remain adaptive to uncertainty.

Mateo Haro, Julia Richter, Fan Yang +2

Robotic Systems Lab (RSL), ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

Robot NavigationRobot Motion PlanningReinforcement Learning
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Mar 14, 2026

ImagiNav: Scalable Embodied Navigation via Generative Visual Prediction and Inverse Dynamics

Enabling robots to navigate open-world environments via natural language is critical for general-purpose autonomy. Yet, Vision-Language Navigation has relied on end-to-end policies trained on expensive, embodiment-specific robot data. While recent foundation models trained on vast simulation data show promise, the challenge of scaling and generalizing persists due to the limited scene diversity and visual fidelity in simulation. To address this gap, we propose ImagiNav, a novel hierarchical paradigm that formulates navigation in visual space. Instead of predicting waypoints, ImagiNav synthesizes a future egocentric video conditioned on language instructions, serving as a high-level plan, interpreted by an inverse dynamics model to extract metric trajectories for execution. By decoupling planning from robot actuation, the paradigm enables direct utilization of diverse in-the-wild navigation videos. To support this, we develop an auto-labeling data pipeline that enhances motion annotation accuracy. ImagiNav demonstrates strong zero-shot transfer to robot navigation without requiring robot demonstrations, paving the way for generalist robots that learn navigation directly from unlabeled, open-world data. The project page is available at: https://j1dan.github.io/ImagiNav

Jie Chen, Yuxin Cai, Yizhuo Wang +5

Department of Mechanical Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore · Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore · Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore

Robot NavigationVision-Language NavigationData-Efficient Robot Learning
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Mar 14, 2026

SAATT Nav: a Socially Aware Autonomous Transparent Transportation Navigation Framework for Wheelchairs

While powered wheelchairs reduce physical fatigue as opposed to manual wheelchairs for individuals with mobility impairment, they demand high cognitive workload due to information processing, decision making and motor coordination. Current autonomous systems lack social awareness in navigation and transparency in decision-making, leading to decreased perceived safety and trust from the user and others in context. This work proposes Socially Aware Autonomous Transparent Transportation (SAATT) Navigation framework for wheelchairs as a potential solution. By implementing a Large Language Model (LLM) informed of user intent and capable of predicting other peoples' intent as a decision-maker for its local controller, it is able to detect and navigate social situations, such as passing pedestrians or a pair conversing. Furthermore, the LLM textually communicates its reasoning at each waypoint for transparency. In this experiment, it is compared against a standard global planner, a representative competing social navigation model, and an Ablation study in three simulated environments varied by social levels in eight metrics categorized under Safety, Social Compliance, Efficiency, and Comfort. Overall, SAATT Nav outperforms in most social situations and equivalently or only slightly worse in the remaining metrics, demonstrating the potential of a socially aware and transparent autonomous navigation system to assist wheelchair users.

Yutong Zhang, Shaiv Y. Mehra, Bradley S. Duerstock +1

Edwardson School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA · Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907, USA

Robot NavigationSocial Robot NavigationAssistive RoboticsLarge Language Model-Based Robot Planning
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Mar 13, 2026

Beyond Imitation: Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning for Adaptive Diffusion Navigation Policies

Diffusion-based robot navigation policies trained on large-scale imitation learning datasets, can generate multi-modal trajectories directly from the robot's visual observations, bypassing the traditional localization-mapping-planning pipeline and achieving strong zero-shot generalization. However, their performance remains constrained by the coverage of offline datasets, and when deployed in unseen settings, distribution shift often leads to accumulated trajectory errors and safety-critical failures. Adapting diffusion policies with reinforcement learning is challenging because their iterative denoising structure hinders effective gradient backpropagation, while also making the training of an additional value network computationally expensive and less stable. To address these issues, we propose a reinforcement learning fine-tuning framework tailored for diffusion-based navigation. The method leverages the inherent multi-trajectory sampling mechanism of diffusion models and adopts Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), which estimates relative advantages across sampled trajectories without requiring a separate value network. To preserve pretrained representations while enabling adaptation, we freeze the visual encoder and selectively update the higher decoder layers and action head, enhancing safety-aware behaviors through online environmental feedback. On the PointGoal task in Isaac Sim, our approach improves the Success Rate from 52.0% to 58.7% and SPL from 0.49 to 0.54 on unseen scenes, while reducing collision frequency. Additional experiments show that the fine-tuned policy transfers zero-shot to a real quadruped platform and maintains stable performance in geometrically out-of-distribution environments, suggesting improved adaptability and safe generalization to new domains.

Junhe Sheng, Ruofei Bai, Kuan Xu +5

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. · A*STAR, Singapore. · National University of Singapore, Singapore.

Robot NavigationRobot Policy AdaptationRL Fine-TuningDiffusion PolicyRobot Policy Generalization
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Mar 13, 2026

Prepare to Turn: Learning Anticipatory Maneuvering for Fast Sequential Quadrupedal Navigation

Fast quadrupedal navigation requires preparing for the next turn while approaching the current goal. Policies trained to reach and remain at a single target can instead produce stop-and-go motion when applied to sequential goals, compromising its agility potential. We introduce PrepTurn, a reinforcement learning framework for anticipatory maneuvering in sequential local navigation. PrepTurn maps the current and next pose goals directly to joint actions, using the upcoming goal to inform how the robot should approaches the current one. Its persistent-credit reward encourages timely completion of the whole sequence by continuing to reward reached goals while moving on and preparing subsequent maneuvers, and an automatic curriculum that gradually increases goal difficulty is critical for learning stable turning behaviors. Together, these components enable the policy to coordinate approach speed and reorientation across goal transitions without prescribed trajectories or arrival times. Simulation and onboard Unitree Go2 experiments demonstrate fast, efficient sequential traversal with high completion and reduced stop-and-go motion. We further show that when the goal-reaching tolerances are more relaxed, the policy learns to exploit the freedom allowed by the task with emergent behaviors, such as turning to the next goal in advance and cutting corners within the permitted regions behaviors, to traverse goal sequences more efficiently.

Zunzhi You, Yunke Wang, Haolan Guo +1

All authors are with School of Computer Science, University of Sydney.

Robot Policy LearningRobot NavigationRL for Legged LocomotionQuadruped LocomotionQuadruped Robot Navigation
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Mar 13, 2026

FLUX: Accelerating Cross-Embodiment Generative Navigation Policies via Rectified Flow and Static-to-Dynamic Learning

Autonomous navigation requires a broad spectrum of skills, from static goal-reaching to dynamic social traversal, yet evaluation remains fragmented across disparate protocols. We introduce DynBench, a dynamic navigation benchmark featuring physically valid crowd simulation. Combined with existing static protocols, it supports comprehensive evaluation across six fundamental navigation tasks. Within this framework, we propose FLUX, the first flow-based unified navigation policy. By linearizing probability flow, FLUX replaces iterative denoising with straight-line trajectories, improving per-step inference efficiency by 47% over prior flow-based methods and 29% over diffusion-based ones. Following a static-to-dynamic curriculum, FLUX initially establishes geometric priors and is subsequently refined through reinforcement learning in dynamic social environments. This regime not only strengthens socially-aware navigation but also enhances static task robustness by capturing recovery behaviors through stochastic action distributions. FLUX achieves state-of-the-art performance across all tasks and demonstrates zero-shot sim-to-real transfer on wheeled, quadrupedal, and humanoid platforms without any fine-tuning.

Zeying Gong, Yangyi Zhong, Yiyi Ding +6

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology · National University of Singapore

Robot Navigation BenchmarksRobot Policy LearningRobot NavigationCross-Embodiment Robot LearningSocial Robot NavigationRectified Flow
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Mar 12, 2026

A Hybrid Neural-Assisted Unscented Kalman Filter for Unmanned Ground Vehicle Navigation

Modern autonomous navigation for unmanned ground vehicles relies on different estimators to fuse inertial sensors and GNSS measurements. However, the constant noise covariance matrices often struggle to account for dynamic real-world conditions. In this work we propose a hybrid estimation framework that bridges classical state estimation foundations with modern deep learning approaches. Instead of altering the fundamental unscented Kalman filter equations, a dedicated deep neural network is developed to predict the process and measurement noise uncertainty directly from raw inertial and GNSS measurements. We present a sim2real approach, with training performed only on simulative data. In this manner, we offer perfect ground truth data and relieves the burden of extensive data recordings. To evaluate our proposed approach and examine its generalization capabilities, we employed a 160-minutes test set from three datasets each with different types of vehicles (off-road vehicle, passenger car, and mobile robot), inertial sensors, road surface, and environmental conditions. We demonstrate across the three datasets a position improvement of 12.7%12.7\% compared to the adaptive model-based approach. Thus, offering a scalable and a more robust solution for unmanned ground vehicles navigation tasks.

Gal Versano, Itzik Klein

Autonomous Navigation and Sensor Fusion Lab, Hatter Department of Marine Technologies, Charney School of Marine Sciences, University of Haifa, Israel.

Robot NavigationUnscented Kalman FilteringCovariance EstimationMultimodal Sensor Fusion
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Mar 10, 2026

Degeneracy-Resilient Teach and Repeat for Geometrically Challenging Environments Using FMCW Lidar

Teach and Repeat (T&R) topometric navigation enables robots to autonomously repeat previously traversed paths without relying on GPS, making it well suited for operations in GPS-denied environments such as underground mines and lunar navigation. State-of-the-art T&R systems typically rely on iterative closest point (ICP)-based estimation; however, in geometrically degenerate environments with sparsely structured terrain, ICP often becomes ill-conditioned, resulting in degraded localization and unreliable navigation performance. To address this challenge, we present a degeneracy-resilient Frequency-Modulated Continuous-Wave (FMCW) lidar T&R navigation system consisting of Doppler velocity-based odometry and degeneracy-aware scan-to-map localization. Leveraging FMCW lidar, which provides per-point radial velocity measurements via the Doppler effect, we extend a geometry-independent, correspondence-free motion estimation to include principled pose uncertainty estimation that remains stable in degenerate environments. We further propose a curvature-enhanced degeneracy-aware localization method that leverages per-point curvature for improved data association and adaptive registration formulation, and unifies translational and rotational scales to enable consistent degeneracy detection. Closed-loop field experiments spanning environments with varying structural richness demonstrate that the proposed system reliably completes autonomous navigation, including in a challenging flat airport test field where a conventional ICP-based system fails. We release the implementation of this work at: https://opensource_code/place_holder.

Katya M. Papais, Wenda Zhao, Timothy D. Barfoot

The authors are with the Institute for Aerospace Studies, University of Toronto, Canada.

Embodied NavigationRobot NavigationLiDAR OdometryLiDAR LocalizationRobot Localization
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Mar 10, 2026

BEACON: Language-Conditioned Navigation Affordance Prediction under Occlusion

Language-conditioned local navigation requires a robot to infer a nearby traversable target location from its current observation and an open-vocabulary, relational instruction. Existing vision-language spatial grounding methods usually rely on vision-language models (VLMs) to reason in image space, producing 2D predictions tied to visible pixels. As a result, they struggle to infer target locations in occluded regions, typically caused by furniture or moving humans. To address this issue, we propose BEACON, which predicts an ego-centric Bird's-Eye View (BEV) affordance heatmap over a bounded local region including occluded areas. Given an instruction and surround-view RGB-D observations from four directions around the robot, BEACON predicts the BEV heatmap by injecting spatial cues into a VLM and fusing the VLM's output with depth-derived BEV features. Using an occlusion-aware dataset built in the Habitat simulator, we conduct detailed experimental analysis to validate both our BEV space formulation and the design choices of each module. Our method improves the accuracy averaged across geodesic thresholds by 22.74 percentage points over the state-of-the-art image-space baseline on the validation subset with occluded target locations. Our project page is: https://xin-yu-gao.github.io/beacon.

Xinyu Gao, Gang Chen, Javier Alonso-Mora

Department of Cognitive Robotics (CoR), Delft University of Technology

Robot NavigationVision-Language NavigationVLMs for Robotics
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Mar 10, 2026

TinyNav: End-to-End TinyML for Real-Time Autonomous Navigation on Microcontrollers

Autonomous navigation typically relies on power-intensive processors, limiting accessibility in low-cost robotics. Although microcontrollers offer a resource-efficient alternative, they impose strict constraints on model complexity. We present TinyNav, an end-to-end TinyML system for real-time autonomous navigation on an ESP32 microcontroller. A custom-trained, quantized 2D convolutional neural network processes a 20-frame sliding window of depth data to predict steering and throttle commands. By avoiding 3D convolutions and recurrent layers, the 23k-parameter model achieves 30 ms inference latency. Correlation analysis and Grad-CAM validation indicate consistent spatial awareness and obstacle avoidance behavior. TinyNav demonstrates that responsive autonomous control can be deployed directly on highly constrained edge devices, reducing reliance on external compute resources.

Pooria Roy, Nourhan Jadallah. Tomer Lapid, Shahzaib Ahmad +2

Queen’s University

Robot NavigationOn-Device InferenceTiny MLEfficient Neural Network Inference
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Mar 10, 2026

LLMs for Text-Based Exploration and Navigation Under Partial Observability

Exploration and goal-directed navigation in unknown layouts are central to inspection, logistics, and search-and-rescue. We ask whether large language models (LLMs) can function as text-only controllers under partial observability -- without code execution, tools, or program synthesis. We introduce a reproducible benchmark with oracle localisation in fixed ASCII gridworlds: each step reveals only a local 5×55\times5 window around the agent and the model must select one of UP/RIGHT/DOWN/LEFT. Nine contemporary LLMs ranging from open/proprietary, dense / Mixture of Experts and instruction- vs. reasoning-tuned are evaluated on two tasks across three layouts of increasing difficulty: Exploration (maximising revealed cells) and Navigation (reach the goal on the shortest path). The experimental results are evaluated on quantitative metrics including success rate, efficiency such as normalised coverage and path length vs. oracle as well as qualitative analysis. Reasoning-tuned models reliably complete navigation across all layouts, yet remain less efficient than oracle paths. Few-shot demonstrations in the prompt chiefly help these Reasoning-tuned models by reducing invalid moves and shortening paths, while classic dense instruction models remain inconsistent. We observe characteristic action priors (UP/RIGHT) that can induce looping under partial observability. Overall, training regimen and test-time deliberation predict control ability better than raw parameter count. These findings suggest lightweight hybridisation with classical online planners as a practical route to deployable partial map systems.

Stephan Sandfuchs, Maximilian Melchert, Jörg Frochte

AKIS – Interdisciplinary Institute for Applied AI and Data Science Ruhr, Bochum University of Applied Sciences, Bochum, Germany

Language Model-Based ControlRobot NavigationAI Agent Benchmarks
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Mar 10, 2026

SEA-Nav: Efficient Policy Learning for Safe and Agile Quadruped Navigation in Cluttered Environments

Efficiently learning safe and agile quadruped navigation in densely cluttered environments remains difficult: existing methods often lack safety and agility, or become conservative in complex scenes and require long training schedules. We propose SEA-Nav (Safe, Efficient, and Agile Navigation), a safe reinforcement learning framework for quadruped navigation in cluttered environments. A differentiable control barrier function (CBF) shield constrains the policy to produce safe velocity commands. An adaptive collision-state initialization mechanism increases the probability of learning from safety-critical near-collision experience. An action regularization term further suppresses infeasible commands for physical deployment. The policy converges after about one hour of training on a single RTX 4090 and transfers zero-shot to real-world cluttered scenes.

Shiyi Chen, Mingye Yang, Haiyi Liu +6

Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. · Imperial College London, London, UK.

Quadruped Robot NavigationRobot NavigationSafe Robot NavigationSafe RLData-Efficient Robot Learning
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Mar 10, 2026

PM-Nav: Priori-Map Guided Embodied Navigation in Functional Buildings

Existing language-driven embodied navigation paradigms face challenges in functional buildings (FBs) with highly similar features, as they lack the ability to effectively utilize priori spatial knowledge. To tackle this issue, we propose a Priori-Map Guided Embodied Navigation (PM-Nav), wherein environmental maps are transformed into navigation-friendly semantic priori-maps, a hierarchical chain-of-thought prompt template with an annotation priori-map is designed to enable precise path planning, and a multi-model collaborative action output mechanism is built to accomplish positioning decisions and execution control for navigation planning. Comprehensive tests using a home-made FB dataset show that the PM-Nav obtains average improvements of 511% and 1175%, and 650% and 400% over the SG-Nav and the InstructNav in simulation and real-world, respectively. These tremendous boosts elucidate the great potential of using the PM-Nav as a backbone navigation framework for FBs.

Jiang Gao, Xiangyu Dong, Haozhou Li +3

The authors are with the Faculty of Robot Science and Engineering at Northeastern University, Shenyang, China · The authors are with the Foshan Graduate School of Innovation at Northeastern University, Foshan, China · The authors are with the School of Aeronautic Science and Engineering at Beihang University, Beijing, China

Indoor Robot NavigationEmbodied NavigationRobot NavigationLarge Language Model-Based Robot Planning
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Mar 9, 2026

APPLV: Adaptive Planner Parameter Learning from Vision-Language-Action Model

Autonomous navigation in highly constrained environments remains challenging for mobile robots. Classical navigation approaches offer safety assurances but require environment-specific parameter tuning; end-to-end learning bypasses parameter tuning but struggles with precise control in constrained spaces. To this end, recent robot learning approaches automate parameter tuning while retaining classical systems' safety, yet still face challenges in generalizing to unseen environments. Recently, Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have shown promise by leveraging foundation models' scene understanding capabilities, but still struggle with precise control and inference latency in navigation tasks. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Planner Parameter Learning from Vision-Language-Action Model (applv). Unlike traditional VLA models that directly output actions, applv leverages pre-trained vision-language models with a regression head to predict planner parameters that configure classical planners. We develop two training strategies: supervised learning fine-tuning from collected navigation trajectories and reinforcement learning fine-tuning to further optimize navigation performance. We evaluate applv across multiple motion planners on the simulated Benchmark Autonomous Robot Navigation (BARN) dataset and in physical robot experiments. Results demonstrate that applv outperforms existing methods in both navigation performance and generalization to unseen environments.

Yuanjie Lu, Beichen Wang, Zhengqi Wu +4

Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, Virginia, USA · Department of Engineering Science, University of South Florida, Florida, USA · Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA

Robot NavigationRobot Policy GeneralizationVLMs for Robotics
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Mar 9, 2026

FoMo: A Multi-Season Dataset for Robot Navigation in Forêt Montmorency

The Forêt Montmorency (FoMo) dataset is a comprehensive multi-season data collection, recorded over the span of one year in a boreal forest. Featuring a unique combination of on- and off-pavement environments with significant environmental changes, the dataset challenges established odometry and SLAM pipelines. Some highlights of the data include the accumulation of snow exceeding 1 m, significant vegetation growth in front of sensors, and operations at the traction limits of the platform. In total, the FoMo dataset includes over 64 km of six diverse trajectories, repeated during 12 deployments throughout the year. The dataset features data from one rotating and one hybrid solid-state lidar, a Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar, full-HD images from a stereo camera and a wide lens monocular camera, as well as data from two IMUs. Ground Truth is calculated by post-processing three GNSS receivers mounted on the Uncrewed Ground Vehicle (UGV) and a static GNSS base station. Additional metadata, such as one measurement per minute from an on-site weather station, camera calibration intrinsics, and vehicle power consumption, is available for all sequences. To highlight the relevance of the dataset, we performed a preliminary evaluation of the robustness of a lidar-inertial, radar-gyro, and a visual-inertial localization and mapping techniques to seasonal changes. We show that seasonal changes have serious effects on the re-localization capabilities of the state-of-the-art methods. The dataset and development kit are available at https://fomo.norlab.ulaval.ca.

Matěj Boxan, Gabriel Jeanson, Alexander Krawciw +5

Norlab, Universit´e Laval, Quebec City, Canada · University of Toronto Robotics Institute, Toronto, Canada

Simultaneous Localization and MappingRobotic Data CollectionRobot NavigationLiDAR OdometryRobot Localization
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Mar 9, 2026

EndoSERV: A Vision-based Endoluminal Robot Navigation System

Robot-assisted endoluminal procedures are increasingly used for early cancer intervention. However, the intricate, narrow and tortuous pathways within the luminal anatomy pose substantial difficulties for robot navigation. Vision-based navigation offers a promising solution, but existing localization approaches are error-prone due to tissue deformation, in vivo artifacts and a lack of distinctive landmarks for consistent localization. This paper presents a novel EndoSERV localization method to address these challenges. It includes two main parts, i.e., SEgment-to-structure and Real-to-Virtual mapping, and hence the name. For long-range and complex luminal structures, we divide them into smaller sub-segments and estimate the odometry independently. To cater for label insufficiency, an efficient transfer technique maps real image features to the virtual domain to use virtual pose ground truth. The training phases of EndoSERV include an offline pretraining to extract texture-agnostic features, and an online phase that adapts to real-world conditions. Extensive experiments based on both public and clinical datasets have been performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method even without any real pose labels.

Junyang Wu, Fangfang Xie, Minghui Zhang +4

Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, 200240. · Shanghai Chest Hospital, Shanghai, China.

Robot NavigationRobot LocalizationRobotic EndoscopyVisual Odometry
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Mar 9, 2026

From Reactive to Map-Based AI: Tuned Local LLMs for Semantic Zone Inference in Object-Goal Navigation

Object-Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) requires an agent to find and navigate to a target object category in unknown environments. While recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents exhibit zero-shot reasoning, they often rely on a "reactive" paradigm that lacks explicit spatial memory, leading to redundant exploration and myopic behaviors. To address these limitations, we propose a transition from reactive AI to "Map-Based AI" by integrating LLM-based semantic inference with a hybrid topological-grid mapping system. Our framework employs a fine-tuned Llama-2 model via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) to infer semantic zone categories and target existence probabilities from verbalized object observations. In this study, a "zone" is defined as a functional area described by the set of observed objects, providing crucial semantic co-occurrence cues for finding the target. This semantic information is integrated into a topological graph, enabling the agent to prioritize high-probability areas and perform systematic exploration via Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) optimization. Evaluations in the AI2-THOR simulator demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms traditional frontier exploration and reactive LLM baselines, achieving a superior Success Rate (SR) and Success weighted by Path Length (SPL).

Yudai Noda, Kanji Tanaka

Yudai Noda and Kanji Tanaka are with the Graduate School of Engineering, University of Fukui, Japan.

Robot NavigationObject-Goal NavigationLarge Language Model-Based Robot Planning
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Mar 9, 2026

Long-Short Term Agents for Pure-Vision Bronchoscopy Robotic Autonomy

Accurate intraoperative navigation is essential for robot-assisted endoluminal intervention, but remains difficult because of limited endoscopic field of view and dynamic artifacts. Existing navigation platforms often rely on external localization technologies, such as electromagnetic tracking or shape sensing, which increase hardware complexity and remain vulnerable to intraoperative anatomical mismatch. We present a vision-only autonomy framework that performs long-horizon bronchoscopic navigation using preoperative CT-derived virtual targets and live endoscopic video, without external tracking during navigation. The framework uses hierarchical long-short agents: a short-term reactive agent for continuous low-latency motion control, and a long-term strategic agent for decision support at anatomically ambiguous points. When their recommendations conflict, a world-model critic predicts future visual states for candidate actions and selects the action whose predicted state best matches the target view. We evaluated the system in a high-fidelity airway phantom, three ex vivo porcine lungs, and a live porcine model. The system reached all planned segmental targets in the phantom, maintained 80% success to the eighth generation ex vivo, and achieved in vivo navigation performance comparable to the expert bronchoscopist. These results support the preclinical feasibility of sensor-free autonomous bronchoscopic navigation.

Junyang Wu, Mingyi Luo, Fangfang Xie +7

Institute of Medical Robotics, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China. · Shanghai Chest Hospital, Shanghai, 10587, China.

Robot NavigationRobotic EndoscopyVision-Based Robot ControlEndoscopyRobot Task Planning
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Mar 8, 2026

A Robust Antenna Provides Tactile Feedback in a Multi-legged Robot

Multi-legged elongate robots hold promise for maneuvering through complex environments. Prior work has demonstrated that reliable locomotion can be achieved using open-loop body undulation and foot placement on rugose terrain. However, robust navigation through confined spaces remains challenging when body-environment contact is extensive and terrain rheology varies rapidly. To address this challenge, we develop a pair of tactile antennae for multi-legged robots that enable real-time sensing of surrounding geometry, modeling the morphology and function of biological centipede antennae. Each antenna features gradient compliance, with a stiff base and soft tip, allowing repeated deformation and elastic recovery. Robophysical experiments reveal a relationship between continuous antenna curvature and contact force, leading to a simplified mapping from antenna deformation to inferred discrete collision states. We incorporate this mapping into a controller that selects among a set of locomotor maneuvers based on the inferred collision state. Experiments in obstacle-rich and confined environments demonstrate that tactile feedback enables reliable steering and allows the robot to recover from near-stuck conditions without requiring global environmental information or real-time vision. These results highlight how mechanically tuned tactile appendages can simplify sensing and enhance autonomy in elongate multi-legged robots operating in constrained spaces.

Zhaochen J. Xu, Juntao He, Delfin Aydan +5

All authors are with the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332, USA.

Legged RoboticsRobot NavigationRobotic Tactile SensingRobot Locomotion
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Mar 8, 2026

GSAT: Geometric Traversability Estimation using Self-supervised Learning with Anomaly Detection for Diverse Terrains

Safe autonomous navigation requires reliable estimation of environmental traversability. Traditional methods have relied on semantic or geometry-based approaches with human-defined thresholds, but these methods often yield unreliable predictions due to the inherent subjectivity of human supervision. While self-supervised approaches enable robots to learn from their own experience, they still face a fundamental challenge: the positive-only learning problem. To address these limitations, recent studies have employed Positive-Unlabeled (PU) learning, where the core challenge is identifying positive samples without explicit negative supervision. In this work, we propose GSAT, which addresses these limitations by constructing a positive hypersphere in latent space to classify traversable regions through anomaly detection without requiring additional prototypes (e.g., unlabeled or negative). Furthermore, our approach employs joint learning of anomaly classification and traversability prediction to more efficiently utilize robot experience. We comprehensively evaluate the proposed framework through ablation studies, validation on heterogeneous real-world robotic platforms, and autonomous navigation demonstrations in simulation environments.

Dongjin Cho, Miryeong Park, Juhui Lee +2

the Electrical and Computer Engineering and INHA Future Mobility IPCC, Inha University, Incheon, South Korea.

Robot Traversability EstimationRobotic PerceptionRobot NavigationOff-Road Robot NavigationUnsupervised Anomaly Detection
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Mar 6, 2026

A Contrastive Fewshot RGBD Traversability Segmentation Framework for Indoor Robotic Navigation

Indoor traversability segmentation aims to identify safe, navigable free space for autonomous agents, which is critical for robotic navigation. Pure vision-based models often fail to detect thin obstacles, such as chair legs, which can pose serious safety risks. We propose a multi-modal segmentation framework that leverages RGB images and sparse 1D laser depth information to capture geometric interactions and improve the detection of challenging obstacles. To reduce the reliance on large labeled datasets, we adopt the few-shot segmentation (FSS) paradigm, enabling the model to generalize from limited annotated examples. Traditional FSS methods focus solely on positive prototypes, often leading to overfitting to the support set and poor generalization. To address this, we introduce a negative contrastive learning (NCL) branch that leverages negative prototypes (obstacles) to refine free-space predictions. Additionally, we design a two-stage attention depth module to align 1D depth vectors with RGB images both horizontally and vertically. Extensive experiments on our custom-collected indoor RGB-D traversability dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art FSS and RGB-D segmentation baselines, achieving up to 9% higher mIoU under both 1-shot and 5-shot settings. These results highlight the effectiveness of leveraging negative prototypes and sparse depth for robust and efficient traversability segmentation.

Qiyuan An, Tuan Dang, Fillia Makedon

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Texas at Arlington, 1225 West Mitchell, Arlington, TX 76019, USA · Uber, Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA · Cognitive Robotics Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA

Indoor Robot NavigationSemantic SegmentationRobot NavigationFew-Shot Semantic SegmentationContrastive Learning
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Mar 6, 2026

T2Nav Algebraic Topology Aware Temporal Graph Memory and Loop Detection for ZeroShot Visual Navigation

Deploying autonomous agents in real world environments is challenging, particularly for navigation, where systems must adapt to situations they have not encountered before. Traditional learning approaches require substantial amounts of data, constant tuning, and, sometimes, starting over for each new task. That makes them hard to scale and not very flexible. Recent breakthroughs in foundation models, such as large language models and vision language models, enable systems to attempt new navigation tasks without requiring additional training. However, many of these methods only work with specific input types, employ relatively basic reasoning, and fail to fully exploit the details they observe or the structure of the spaces. Here, we introduce T2Nav, a zeroshot navigation system that integrates heterogeneous data and employs graph-based reasoning. By directly incorporating visual information into the graph and matching it to the environment, our approach enables the system to strike a good balance between exploration and goal attainment. This strategy allows robust obstacle avoidance, reliable loop closure detection, and efficient path planning while eliminating redundant exploration patterns. The system demonstrates flexibility by handling goals specified using reference images of target object instances, making it particularly suitable for scenarios in which agents must navigate to visually similar yet spatially distinct instances. Experiments demonstrate that our approach is efficient and adapts well to unknown environments, moving toward practical zero-shot instance-image navigation capabilities.

Quang-Anh N. D., Duc Pham, Minh-Anh Nguyen +2

International School, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Vietnam. · *Cognitive Robotics Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA. · Hanoi University of Science, Vietnam National University, Hanoi, Vietnam. +1

Robot Navigation
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Mar 6, 2026

SysNav: Multi-Level Systematic Cooperation Enables Real-World, Cross-Embodiment Object Navigation

Object navigation (ObjectNav) in real-world environments is a complex problem that requires simultaneously addressing multiple challenges, including complex spatial structure, long-horizon planning and semantic understanding. Recent advances in Vision-Language Models (VLMs) offer promising capabilities for semantic understanding, yet effectively integrating them into real-world navigation systems remains a non-trivial challenge. In this work, we formulate real-world ObjectNav as a system-level problem and introduce SysNav, a three-level ObjectNav system designed for real-world crossembodiment deployment. SysNav decouples semantic reasoning, navigation planning and motion control to ensure robustness and generalizability. At the high-level, we summarize the environment into a structured scene representation and leverage VLMs to provide semantic-grounded navigation guidance. At the mid-level, we introduce a hierarchical room-based navigation strategy that reserves VLM guidance for room-level decisions, which effectively utilizes its reasoning ability while ensuring system efficiency. At the low-level, planned waypoints are executed through different embodiment-specific motion control modules. We deploy our system on three embodiments, a custom-built wheeled robot, the Unitree Go2 quadruped and the Unitree G1 humanoid, and conduct 190 real-world experiments. Our system achieves substantial improvements in both success rate and navigation efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, SysNav is the first system capable of reliably and efficiently completing building-scale long-range object navigation in complex real-world environments. Furthermore, extensive experiments on four simulation benchmarks demonstrate state-of-the-art performance. Project page is available at: https://cmu-vln.github.io/.

Haokun Zhu, Zongtai Li, Zihan Liu +8

Carnegie Mellon University · New York University · Nanyang Technological University

Robot NavigationObject-Goal Navigation
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Mar 6, 2026

DreamToNav: Generalizable Navigation for Robots via Generative Video Planning

We present DreamToNav, a novel autonomous robot framework that uses generative video models to enable intuitive, human-in-the-loop control. Instead of relying on rigid waypoint navigation, users provide natural language prompts (e.g. ``Follow the person carefully''), which the system translates into executable motion. Our pipeline first employs Qwen 2.5-VL-7B-Instruct to refine vague user instructions into precise visual descriptions. These descriptions condition NVIDIA Cosmos 2.5, a state-of-the-art video foundation model, to synthesize a physically consistent video sequence of the robot performing the task. From this synthetic video, we extract a valid kinematic path using visual pose estimation, robot detection and trajectory recovery. By treating video generation as a planning engine, DreamToNav allows robots to visually "dream" complex behaviors before executing them, providing a unified framework for obstacle avoidance and goal-directed navigation without task-specific engineering. We evaluate the approach on both a wheeled mobile robot and a quadruped robot in indoor navigation tasks. DreamToNav achieves a success rate of 76.7%, with final goal errors typically within 0.05-0.10 m and trajectory tracking errors below 0.15 m. These results demonstrate that trajectories extracted from generative video predictions can be reliably executed on physical robots across different locomotion platforms.

Valerii Serpiva, Jeffrin Sam, Chidera Simon +4

The authors are with the Intelligent Space Robotics Laboratory, Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology Moscow, Bolshoy Boulevard 30, bld. 1, 121205, Moscow, Russia.

Robot NavigationVisual Robot NavigationRobot Motion GenerationVLMs for Robotics
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Mar 6, 2026

MagRobot:An Open Simulator for Magnetically Navigated Robots

Magnetic navigation systems, including magnetic tracking systems and magnetic actuation systems, have shown great potential for occlusion-free localization and remote control of intracorporeal medical devices and robots in minimally invasive medicine, such as capsule endoscopy and cardiovascular intervention. However, the design of magnetically navigated robots remains heavily reliant on experimental prototyping, which is time-consuming and costly. Furthermore, there is a lack of a consistent experimental environment to compare and benchmark the hardware and algorithms across different magnetic navigation systems. To address these challenges, we propose the first universal open-source simulation platform to facilitate research, design and benchmarking of magnetically navigated robots. Our simulator features an intuitive graphical user interface that enables the user to efficiently design, visualize, and analyze magnetic navigation systems for both rigid and soft robots. The proposed simulator is versatile, which can simulate both magnetic actuation and magnetic tracking tasks in diverse medical applications that involve deformable anatomies. The proposed simulator provides an open development environment, where the user can load third-party anatomical models and customize both hardware and algorithms of magnetic navigation systems. The fidelity of the simulator is validated using both phantom and ex vivo experiments of magnetic navigation of a continuum robot and a capsule robot with diverse magnetic actuation setups. Three use cases of the simulator, i.e., bronchoscopy, endovascular intervention, and gastrointestinal endoscopy, are implemented to demonstrate the functionality of the simulator. It is shown that the configuration and algorithms of magnetic navigation systems can be flexibly designed and optimized for better performance using the simulator.

Heng Wang, Haoyu Song, Jiatao Zheng +2

South China University of Technology · Shien-Ming Wu School of Intelligent Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, China 511442

Robotics SimulationRoboticsRobot Navigation
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Mar 6, 2026

Don't Freeze, Don't Crash: Extending the Safe Operating Range of Neural Navigation in Dense Crowds

Navigating safely through dense crowds requires collision avoidance that generalizes beyond the densities seen during training. Learning-based crowd navigation can break under out-of-distribution crowd sizes due to density-sensitive observation normalization and social-cost scaling, while analytical solvers often remain safe but freeze in tight interactions. We propose a reinforcement learning approach for dense, variable-density navigation that attains zero-shot density generalization using a density-invariant observation encoding with density-randomized training and physics-informed proxemic reward shaping with density-adaptive scaling. The encoding represents the distance-sorted KK nearest pedestrians plus bounded crowd summaries, keeping input statistics stable as crowd size grows. Trained with N ⁣∈ ⁣[11,16]N\!\in\![11,16] pedestrians in a 3m×3m3\mathrm{m}\times3\mathrm{m} arena and evaluated up to N ⁣= ⁣21N\!=\!21 pedestrians (1.3×1.3\times denser), our policy reaches the goal in >99%>99\% of episodes and achieves 86%86\% collision-free success in random crowds, with markedly less freezing than analytical methods and a > ⁣60>\!60-point collision-free margin over learning-based benchmark methods. Codes are available at https://github.com/jznmsl/PSS-Social.

Jiefu Zhang, Yang Xu, Vaneet Aggarwal

Purdue University, USA

Safe Robot NavigationRobot NavigationRobot Collision AvoidanceRobot Policy LearningRobot Policy Generalization
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Mar 6, 2026

Task-Level Decisions to Gait Level Control: A Hierarchical Policy Approach for Quadruped Navigation

Real-world quadruped navigation is constrained by a scale mismatch between high-level navigation decisions and low-level gait execution, as well as by instabilities under out-of-distribution environmental changes. Such variations challenge sim-to-real transfer and can trigger falls when policies lack explicit interfaces for adaptation. In this paper, we present a hierarchical policy architecture for quadrupedal navigation, termed Task-level Decision to Gait Control (TDGC). A low-level policy, trained with reinforcement learning in simulation, delivers gait-conditioned locomotion and maps task requirements to a compact set of controllable behavior parameters, enabling robust mode generation and smooth switching. A high-level policy makes task-centric decisions from sparse semantic or geometric terrain cues and translates them into low-level targets, forming a traceable decision pipeline without dense maps or high-resolution terrain reconstruction. Different from end-to-end approaches, our architecture provides explicit interfaces for deployment-time tuning, fault diagnosis, and policy refinement. We introduce a structured curriculum with performance-driven progression that expands environmental difficulty and disturbance ranges. Experiments show higher task success rates on mixed terrains and out-of-distribution tests.

Sijia Li, Haoyu Wang, Shenghai Yuan +2

Quadruped Robot NavigationRobot NavigationQuadruped LocomotionTerrain-Aware Robot LocomotionHierarchical RLSim-to-Real Transfer
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