Robot Navigation

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62 papers in the last four weeks, up 520% on the four weeks before. 0.6% of all new papers.

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Sep 28, 2026cs.RO

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

Object navigation requires an embodied agent to find an object in an unseen environment under partial observability and a limited motion budget. Existing methods primarily optimize where the robot should go next by ranking candidate destinations. In contrast to these methods, we present SOR-Nav, a hierarchical navigation system that explicitly arbitrates between continuing to explore the current context and abandoning it for a more promising reachable region. First, an autonomous semantic exploration system is built that accumulates persistent 3D object clusters and organizes reachable frontiers into a cluster decision graph to provide an efficient search abstraction. Then, SOR-Nav uses a context-gated LLM-driven object-search supervisor to evaluate the suitability of the current search context and decide whether to continue exploration or perform cross-region relocation to another reachable frontier cluster. Across the complete, unfiltered validation sets of HM3D-v1, HM3D-v2, and MP3D, SOR-Nav achieves the strongest reported Success Rate (SR) and Success weighted by Path Length (SPL) on all three benchmarks. On MP3D in particular, it more than doubles the previous best SPL from 18.1% to 38.5% while increasing SR from 50.7% to 61.8%. Nested HM3D-v2 ablations validate the proposed decision structure, while a continuous three-target physical deployment demonstrates persistent ObjectNav operation in real-world scenarios.

Yuan Ji, Zirui Li, Yuxin Cai +3

School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 639798, Singapore · Schaeffler Hub for Advance REsearch(SHARE) at NTU, Singapore

Robot Navigation Object-Goal Navigation

Sep 28, 2026cs.RO

MarsLab: A Martian Rover Simulator for Planetary Rover Autonomous Navigation

Future Mars missions will require rover autonomy that can operate across unstructured terrain, changing illumination, atmospheric dust, and limited communication. Simulation is a practical way to study these conditions before deployment, but existing Mars-relevant resources differ in scope, including mission-oriented simulators, fixed analog datasets, task-specific environments, and open robotics interfaces. In this context, we present MarsLab, an open-source, ROS2-native Mars rover simulator for autonomy and navigation algorithm development. MarsLab combines HiRISE-derived and procedural terrain with customizable rock, crater, solar-illumination, and atmospheric-dust settings, and runs a Perseverance-class rover model in NVIDIA Isaac Sim. The runtime publishes RGB, depth, RGB-D point clouds, LiDAR, IMU, wheel odometry, and Ground Truth (GT) pose data through standard ROS2 topics. We demonstrate MarsLab with Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) benchmarks across sensing modalities, dust levels, scene geometry, and route length, and with Visual Place Recognition (VPR) benchmarks over repeated Mars Base traversals under illumination and dust changes. The results illustrate how controlled scene variation and shared GT trajectories can be used to compare trajectory-level estimation and image-level place recognition within the same simulator. Our Project Page: https://kimhoyun-robotair.github.io/MarsLab/.

Hoyun Kim, Beomsu Kim, Giseop Kim

Department of Robotics and Mechatronics Engineering, DGIST, Daegu, Republic of Korea

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Off-Road Robot Navigation Space Robotics Robot Navigation

Sep 28, 2026cs.RO

Reliability-Aware Sparse Route Memory for Round-Trip Vision-Language Navigation

Vision-language navigation (VLN) is typically evaluated as a one-way task, although deployed robots may need to return after reaching a goal. We study continuous round-trip VLN and diagnose failures in directional observability, deviation recovery, and termination stability. We propose a reliability-aware sparse route memory that records the executed Outbound trajectory as ordered geometric anchors and queries them in reverse through a structured hint, action-level arbitration, and terminal verification. On 50 reverse-paired episodes using NaVILA and a simulated Unitree Go2, language-only Return succeeds in 22.0% of episodes, while our online system reaches 55.1%. With exact route information, the same interfaces achieve 86.0%, showing that effective Return requires both accurate information and consistent action on that information. The remaining online gap arises mainly from geometric evidence that is too unreliable to authorise intervention. These results distinguish information quality, behavioural consistency, and online reliability as separate limits in long-horizon navigation.

Bojun Long, Lingfan Bao, Tianhu Peng +2

Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Embodied Navigation Robot Navigation Vision-Language Navigation

Sep 27, 2026cs.RO

InfraVLA: Extending Vision-Language-Action Navigation with Infrastructure Cameras

Many indoor environments in which robots operate, such as warehouses, offices, and hospitals, already have cameras installed. They observe parts of the building that the robot cannot see from where it stands, yet navigation policies, including recent vision-language-action (VLA) models, do not use them. We propose InfraVLA, an end-to-end method that adapts a pretrained navigation VLA to such static infrastructure views: a closed-circuit television (CCTV) encoder turns each external view into tokens of the input sequence. Because the views matter only at rare decision points, fine-tuning alone did not make the policy use them in our experiments; we therefore train in two stages, on demonstrations with upsampled counterfactual data and then on recovery data. We evaluate on two simulated warehouse tasks, finding an object named in the instruction and rerouting around blocked aisles, where the deciding information is often visible only to the infrastructure cameras. Tested in distribution, InfraVLA reached a success rate of 100% on both, against 34.0% and 73.6% for a baseline without CCTV input. On out-of-distribution test sets it reached 88.2% and 88.9%. On a real quadruped fine-tuned with under 10 minutes of demonstrations, the policy reached 83.3% against 29.2% for the on-board-only baseline.

Lukas Vierling, Benjamin Ramtoula, Luke Robinson +2

Dept. of Computer Science, University of Oxford · Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford

Robot Navigation Vision-Language Navigation Vision-Language-Action Models

Sep 26, 2026cs.RO

Learning Social Navigation from Internet Videos in the Policy State Space

Training robust social-navigation policies requires simulators with diverse scene layouts, terrain, and human motion, but constructing such environments and specifying pedestrian behavior is costly. We propose an efficient pipeline that converts ordinary monocular walking videos directly into closed-loop social-navigation training environments in the policy's state space. Our key observation is that local social navigation primarily depends on two types of information: where the robot can traverse and how nearby pedestrians move. We therefore represent the static scene as a metric traversability map, which can be rigidly transformed under counterfactual robot motion, while directly replaying the pedestrian trajectories recovered from the video over time. This abstraction allows us to define the forward dynamics directly in the policy's state space and efficiently simulate counterfactual robot states without reconstructing or rendering photorealistic observations. The resulting policy achieves 81.2% success in the independent Arena benchmark, compared with 75.0% for the strongest baseline, and succeeds in 19/20 real-robot trials without policy fine-tuning. Project page: https://jiaming.im/VideoSocNav

Jiaming Wang, Duc Thang Nguyen, Jizhuo Chen +4

National University of Singapore, Singapore · Singapore Management University, Singapore · The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China +1

Robot Policy Learning Robot Navigation Social Robot Navigation Robot Learning

Sep 24, 2026cs.RO

UCON: Uncertainty-aware Navigation with Historical Re-association in Dynamic Environments

Autonomous navigation in dynamic environments is hindered by two fundamental challenges: perception instability and uncertainty-optimization mismatch. The former leads to identity switches and unreliable motion estimation, while the latter prevents principled incorporation of motion uncertainty into trajectory optimization. To address these challenges, we propose UCON, an uncertainty-aware navigation algorithm in dynamic environments. For perception instability, we present a point-level historical re-association mechanism that leverages historical point cloud fragments to recover lost targets while maintaining identity continuity. Subsequently, a Kalman filter is employed to provide anisotropic motion state estimation and covariance propagation. To resolve the uncertainty-optimization mismatch, we transform predicted states and their covariances into uncertainty sectors, which are embedded as differentiable cost terms within a trajectory optimization framework. This achieves consistent uncertainty-aware dynamic obstacle avoidance while maintaining smoothness and feasibility. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that, while maintaining high computational efficiency, UCON achieves superior perception stability and robust navigation performance in dynamic environments compared to state-of-the-art methods. The code will be open-sourced to facilitate further research.

Bing Sun, Yue Lin, Yongsheng Yuan +3

All authors are with Dalian University of Technology, Dalian 116024.China.

Trajectory Optimization Robot Navigation Motion Planning Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance

Sep 24, 2026cs.RO

ReVNM: Learning-Based Visual Navigation from a Remote Camera

Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) enable robots to navigate from egocentric visual observations without geometric localization and planning, but long-range navigation still requires pre-built maps. This paper presents the Remote Visual Navigation Model (ReVNM), which uses a single remote surveillance camera to serve as both an observation source and an implicit environmental map for visual navigation. While the use of remote cameras could eliminate the need for pre-built maps as well as onboard vision processing, their limited field of view instead of egocentric observations makes it hard to achieve collision-free navigation. The lack of existing data with diverse remote viewpoints, which are crucial for training robust VNMs, further complicates the challenge. In this work, we propose a learning-by-synthesis approach to address this two-fold challenge. Our ReVNM extends a state-of-the-art VNM architecture with an exocentric-to-egocentric (exo2ego) module that predicts an egocentric depth observation from remote-camera observations. This helps the VNM to plan a path while considering obstacles in front of the robot. Trained only on randomly generated worlds with diverse obstacle layouts and camera viewpoints, ReVNM can generalize well to real robot navigation without additional fine-tuning. Experiments in both simulation and real-world environments confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Michikuni Eguchi, Kohei Honda, Masafumi Endo +2

The Graduate School of Comprehensive Human Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan. Work done during an internship at CyberAgent AI Lab. · CyberAgent AI Lab, Tokyo, Japan · The Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering, Nagoya University, Aichi, Japan

Visual Navigation Robot Navigation

Sep 24, 2026cs.RO

A Field-Deployable GNSS-based Navigation Stack for Outdoor Mobile Robots

Outdoor robots require more than an accurate receiver and a path-tracking law: the navigation system must preserve geometric consistency from geographic waypoints to actuator commands, expose measurement validity and timing, and respond to invalid or stale state information. This work presents a ROS2 navigation stack with interchangeable single-GNSS--IMU and dual-antenna-GNSS localization front ends. Both provide a common local East--North--Up state interface for pure pursuit, virtual-point cross-track PID, finite-horizon nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC), and a segment-dependent hybrid dispatcher. The architecture specifies coordinate conventions, datum initialization, asynchronous state construction, waypoint geometry, controller equations, quality gates, command arbitration, and watchdog behavior. Independent physical field runs collected during 2025 and 2026 grape-vineyard deployments support a balanced evaluation of 800 runs, with 100 runs for each of eight controller--localization combinations on an approximately 199.6-m route. The row-hybrid mode yields the lowest run-averaged post-acquisition mean absolute cross-track error (MAE) in the evaluated dataset: 0.00952m with single GNSS+IMU and 0.00846~m with dual GNSS. These findings characterize deviations of the recorded positions from the reference route under the evaluated conditions. The open-source navigation software and deployment instructions are available in the https://github.com/YiyuanLinXX/PPBv2/tree/main/PPBv2_Navigation.

Yiyuan Lin, Cole Regnier, Yu Jiang

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA · School of Integrative Plant Science, Cornell AgriTech, Cornell University, Geneva, NY, USA

Robot Trajectory Tracking Robot Navigation Robot Localization

Sep 23, 2026cs.RO

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

Embodied navigation requires spatial representations that generalize across unseen environments, yet collecting large amounts of annotated data from real 3D environments is difficult. We propose NaviScale for semantic-map-based object navigation (ObjectNav), whose predictor can be trained on pairs of partial and complete semantic maps without reconstructing a complete 3D environment for every training sample. The framework generates large-scale semantic map training data by composing floorplans of real homes with room-level semantic and obstacle maps extracted from MP3D and HM3DSem. NaviScale increases data diversity in two ways: inter-room scaling increases floorplan-level structural diversity, while intra-room scaling fills each fixed floorplan with different combinations of room maps matched by room category. Visibility through Ray Casting (VisRC) converts the composed maps into partial observations that account for field of view, sensing range, and occlusion. The resulting dataset contains 192,000 semantic maps generated from 24,000 floorplans associated with 12,794 properties. With 300k training iterations and the training and inference settings described in this paper, the system reaches 64.3% SR and 34.8% SPL on HM3D, together with 43.1% SR and 16.8% SPL on MP3D, without changing the prediction architecture. Additional experiments evaluate the quality of the composed maps, the effects of semantic-segmentation errors, and deployment on a physical robot.

Chuanlin Lan, Yanwei Zheng, Yuxi Jing +6

School of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Qingdao, China

Robot Navigation Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics Object-Goal Navigation

Sep 22, 2026cs.RO

Planning Trajectories that Bounce: Reflection Classes for Collision-Tolerant Robots

Robot navigation methods tend to avoid contact, and consequently search for collision-free trajectories. For robots with high inertia and limited maneuverability, however, avoiding contact can require substantial steering effort and time, even when interactions with surrounding surfaces could be safely exploited. In this paper, we develop a planning method that deliberately uses controlled wall reflections to generate trajectories that can be easier and more efficient to execute than purely collision-free motion. We consider planar navigation in environments where a mobile robot is permitted to bounce off surrounding surfaces. To represent the resulting alternatives, we construct a reflection-augmented state graph in which paths are partitioned into distinct classes according to the sequence of walls used for reflection. This representation enables systematic enumeration of reflection strategies and identification of the lowest-cost path within each class. We show that, although a reflecting path cannot be shorter than the shortest collision-free path, it can reduce execution time and actuation effort by replacing costly changes in heading with controlled environmental interactions. The planned trajectories are executed using a contact-aware sampling-based controller with the robot's full dynamics. In our experiments, we demonstrate that in our simulated test scenario, the best reflecting class can reduce time and control effort. Our results show that controlled contact can provide dynamically advantageous navigation strategies that are excluded by conventional collision-avoidance formulations.

Subhadeep Koley, Subhrajit Bhattacharya, David Saldaña

Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015, USA

Trajectory Generation Robot Navigation Motion Planning Robot Motion Planning

Sep 22, 2026cs.RO

Skytopia: Monocular Drone Navigation with Action-Conditioned Latent World Models

Monocular drone navigation requires reaching a goal in an unseen environment from a single forward-facing camera, which offers few cues for depth and scale. World models address this by modelling how observations evolve under actions, but they are built to be executed: the prediction is produced at deployment and fed back into action generation at every control step. We argue that what a policy needs from a world model is not the prediction but the representation required to produce it: in flight the executed action explains almost all of the change between observations, so prediction reduces to reprojecting a static scene under a known displacement. We therefore introduce skytopia, a policy built on an action-conditioned latent world model, and the 3D Gaussian Splatting platform on which it is trained. A forward objective predicts the representation of the next observation from the intended motion, and an inverse objective recovers that motion from the predicted transition. Because the prediction never reaches action generation, the predictor is discarded and one policy serves point-goal, image-goal, and goal-free navigation. Simulation experiments show that skytopia outperforms every baseline under all three specifications, attaining 57.8%, 66.0%, and 49.0% success rate, while discarding the predictor removes 59.4% of the inference cost. The same policy is subsequently deployed on a physical drone without fine-tuning and reaches goals in indoor, open outdoor, and woodland environments.

Yuhang Zhang, Rangya Zhang, Yujing Shang +6

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Autel US · XGRIDS +1

Robot Navigation UAV Navigation Action-Conditioned World Models Latent World Models

Sep 22, 2026cs.RO

Predict Before You Step: Auditable Occupancy Forecasting for Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance under Sparse Guidance

Legged robots under sparse waypoint guidance must avoid moving obstacles using partial, rapidly changing LiDAR observations. We present LOOP (Latent-recurrent Occupancy rollOut Policy), a local avoidance policy that connects sparse waypoint guidance to a frozen locomotion controller at 50 Hz. From occupancy and ego-velocity histories, a recurrent predictor forecasts future occupancy over a 1 s horizon by warping the current map with learned flow and visibility gates. These maps guide velocity selection through map-derived features and geometric risk estimates, providing an explicit interface for inspecting and replacing predictions. In encounter-synchronised Isaac Lab evaluations, LOOP achieves 57.1% head-on success at obstacle speeds of 2.5-3.2 m/s, exceeding a retrained reactive baseline by 8.2 percentage points. Comparisons with a rollout-free BEV policy show smaller, scenario-dependent gains from the prediction branch, including improved crossing success and reduced variability across training seeds at the highest head-on speeds. The adapter runs onboard a Unitree Go2 in 14.5 ms per step and completes all 16 real-world crossing trials without collision, demonstrating deployment feasibility.

Yuhui Mao, Fen Liu, Shenghai Yuan +3

School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore 639798

Robot Navigation 3D Occupancy Prediction Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance Explainable Motion Planning

Sep 21, 2026cs.RO

Learning to Drive on Mars: Visual Multimodal Traversability Estimation for Off-World Navigation

Autonomous navigation on Mars requires vehicles to distinguish between traversable terrains across diverse and visually challenging environments. However, progress in learning-based navigation for off-world environments has been limited by the lack of large-scale datasets. Since landing in Jezero Crater, the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover has traversed terrain ranging from sandy dunes, rocky patches, and flat bedrocks. As a result, this paper presents a dataset spanning 500 sols and 45km of trajectories driven by both human operators and the onboard planner, ENav. Our dataset contains grayscale stereo image pairs, poses, accelerometer readings, rocker-bogie angles, and estimates of tilt and wheel slip. Building on this dataset, we introduce an uncertainty-aware traversability-estimation framework that learns terrain representations from multimodal driving experience. We compare our proposed method against existing approaches on the Mars 2020 dataset and show that our method achieves an AUROC of 0.874 and an F1 score of 0.758, outperforming the strongest baseline by 0.058 and 0.156, respectively, while also achieving the highest average precision and recall. Finally, we show that the visual representations can be integrated into path planners, such as ENav, on a physical rover test bed. Videos, code, and the M2020 dataset will be available at https://darren-chiu.github.io/learning-to-drive-on-mars.

Darren Chiu, Cole Wilson, Andrei Tumbar +2

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA. · Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA. · Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164, USA.

Off-Road Robot Navigation Space Robotics Robot Navigation Safe Robot Navigation

Sep 21, 2026cs.RO

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

Vision-language navigation requires embodied agents to navigate environments using natural language instructions and visual observations. Existing approaches typically decompose navigation into sequential language-guided decisions or rely on online exploration without prior environmental knowledge. Scene graph representations offer compact semantic memory but remain decoupled from downstream navigation, which still depends on dense metric maps. To close this gap, we propose an object--path graph that unifies open-vocabulary semantic reasoning with topological navigation. The proposed representation jointly supports semantic grounding, graph-based localization, and navigation within a single lightweight topological framework. Building on this graph, we introduce a navigation strategy that combines global path planning with local inter-node execution through lightweight node localization and semantic visual servoing, enabling navigation directly over the graph without dense metric reconstruction. Experiments on HM3D and Replica demonstrate competitive performance in open-vocabulary object grounding through the proposed hierarchical graph structure, while achieving effective navigation performance. Real-world robot experiments further validate the practicality of the proposed framework.

Linwei Zheng, Daojie Peng, Bingtao Wang +2

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

Robot Navigation Vision-Language Navigation Graph-Based Planning Object-Goal Navigation

Sep 20, 2026eess.SY

Partial-Scan-and-Move Source Seeking for Mobile Robots

This paper presents a partial-scan-and-move strategy for source seeking with a mobile robot equipped with an offset scalar sensor. At each robot position, the sensor collects source field measurements while the robot rotates. Instead of requiring a complete circular scan before every move, we ask when the measurements collected over only part of the circle are already sufficient to determine the next action. We develop a gradient estimation method for partial scans together with a confidence set that accounts for measurement noise and local field variation. The robot uses this confidence set to decide whether it is close enough to the source or has enough information to move in a descent direction. We show that, under suitable conditions, each decision can be made within a prescribed partial scan and that the robot reaches a desired neighborhood of the source in finitely many moves with high probability.

Bo Wang, Ishvar Sitaldin

Department of Mechanical Engineering, The City College of New York, The City University of New York, New York, NY 10031, USA

Mobile Robotics Robot Navigation

Sep 20, 2026cs.CV

Which Terrain Is Better? Preference Learning with VLM Prototypes for Off-Road Traversability Ranking

In vision-based off-road navigation, a robot needs to know not only which obstacles to avoid but also which terrain is better. The first is handled by freespace detection or semantic segmentation. The second is usually answered with a traversability score, but no universal ground truth exists for such a score, so perception falls back on a predefined value per semantic class or a freespace confidence. These scores say what a region is, not which region a robot should prefer. We therefore formulate this preference as visual traversability ranking, an ordering of visible terrain that can be supervised by comparisons between two regions. Standard annotations do not label preference, but they imply its direction. We present TravPro, which converts these annotations into ordered region pairs and fits a small readout on frozen vision--language model (VLM) patch tokens to these pairs. The tokens are clustered once into a fixed prototype bank, and the readout learns a preference score per prototype. The readout is then applied to every patch and serves as a teacher that turns sparse comparisons into dense preference pseudo-labels without pixel-wise annotation. An RGB student distills these maps into a dense terrain-preference map together with a non-ground mask that excludes obstacles and background from the ranking. On five unseen domains, TravPro reaches a mean pairwise accuracy of 0.915 against 0.783 for the strongest baseline, producing an ordering sensitive to surface condition that a per-class value cannot represent. The same VLM and the same supervision yield no such ordering when the VLM is prompted and the supervision is used as dense targets; what matters is how they are used.

Ji-Hoon Hwang, Jisung Bae, E-In Son +3

Visual Navigation Off-Road Robot Navigation Robot Navigation VLMs for Robotics Preference Learning

Sep 20, 2026cs.RO

RiverVLN: Phase-Grounded Temporal Vision--Language Navigation for Unmanned Surface Vehicles

Vision-language navigation (VLN) has largely been developed for indoor and terrestrial robots, where language can often be treated as a static goal and motion is approximated by discrete or near-instantaneous actions. These assumptions break down for unmanned surface vehicles (USVs): river navigation requires continuous motion under inertia and limited maneuverability, while long-horizon instructions must be executed through sparse and visually ambiguous maritime landmarks. We introduce RiverVLN, to our knowledge the first benchmark designed for long-horizon USV VLN under continuous riverine motion, and PGT-NAV, a phase-grounded temporal navigation framework for USVs. Rather than directly mapping an entire instruction to motion, PGT-NAV converts it into an ordered sequence of visually verifiable semantic phases and maintains the active phase online through grounded visual and motion evidence. This explicit semantic progress state is fused with visual-motion history and phase-specific grounding to predict six local SE(2) pose increments. The resulting trajectory is executed in a predict-execute-re-observe loop, where the vessel executes toward W3, updates phase and grounding, and replans through a map-based safety layer. Experiments show that PGT-NAV substantially reduces recursive position and heading drift relative to GNM-style and ViNT-style baselines and achieves an average success rate of 0.79 in Unity-ROS closed-loop navigation. Unseen bridge-opening trials and real-world USV experiments further demonstrate that the phase-grounded representation transfers from controlled evaluation to physical USV deployment.

Jieling Wu, Yuehao Huang, Jiajun Lv +3

Robot Navigation Vision-Language Navigation

Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

Custom PX4 firmware for autonomous hybrid aerial-marine missions

Mapping and monitoring aquatic environments can benefit from hybrid aerial-amphibious drones able to combine flight and water-surface navigation within the same mission. This paper presents a PX4 firmware extension for such platforms, introducing manual and autonomous marine navigation modes integrated with the standard PX4 mission pipeline and QGroundControl interface. The proposed framework preserves existing flight functionalities and safety mechanisms while enabling unified planning and execution of hybrid aerial-marine missions with differentiated aerial and marine waypoints. Simulated case studies validate the implementation and demonstrate stable surface navigation under calm and wavy conditions.

Andrea Capuozzo, Fabio Ruggiero, Vincenzo Lippiello

PRISMA Lab, Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, University of Naples Federico II, Via Claudio 21, Naples, 80125, Italy

Aerial Robotics Robot Navigation UAV Navigation

Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

SmellDiffusion: Diffusion-Based Quadruped Navigation with Olfactory Scene Graphs

A robot sent to a named gas leak must preserve gas identity, estimate the source, and navigate to the resulting goal. We present SmellDiffusion, a simulation pipeline that represents species-specific gas zones in an open-vocabulary olfactory scene graph and shares the selected goal between classical and diffusion planners. Its key components are a peak-local geometric gate for selective source correction and diffusion-based, gas-guided trajectory generation. Among 424 unique source-wind configurations in solved flow, 28 have a concentration peak displaced more than 0.5m from the source. A source-independent geometric gate, calibrated only on the training split and evaluated at the observed peak, detects 9 of 10 held-out displacements at 0.64 precision. Gating a precomputed forward-matching correction reduces mean error on the displaced cases from 1.468m to 0.592m (60%), using matching for only 14/204 cases. All-case mean error falls from 0.205m to 0.180m. All planners receive the same scene-graph source estimate as their goal. In a controlled comparison, best-of-ten diffusion achieves mean gas exposure comparable to gas-guided A* (0.0476 versus 0.0455). A single diffusion proposal takes 41.7ms, compared with 72.3ms for gas-guided A*, although best-of-ten sequential sampling increases total runtime. Plain A* also reaches the same goal and remains the fastest and shortest-path method. Six matched Gazebo runs give mean robot-to-source errors of 0.39m for A* and 0.31m for diffusion.

Faith Ogunwoye, Iana Zhura, Hajira Amjad +5

Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, Moscow, Russia

Trajectory Generation Diffusion-Based Planning Robot Navigation

Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

Navi-Agent: Unlocalized Monocular Navigation Agent

Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires an embodied agent to execute long-horizon instructions in unknown environments. Existing zero-shot VLN-CE systems typically maintain spatial states through geometric localization or coordinate-based representations. Recent geometry-constrained navigation removes depth and globally consistent coordinates, but maintaining persistent spatial awareness for place confirmation, progress verification, and recovery remains challenging. We present Navi-Agent, a zero-shot VLN-CE agent that constructs a coordinate-free spatial state from visual observations and executed motion histories. Navi-Agent organizes this state as a navigation topology, where nodes represent visual places and edges represent motion transitions. This representation enables observation-based approximate self-localization, task progress verification, and visual revisitation-based recovery. Navi-Agent performs closed-loop navigation by decomposing instructions into sub-goals, executing local visual navigation, and verifying visited places through the constructed spatial state. Experiments on zero-shot VLN-CE benchmark and real-world robot platforms show that Navi-Agent achieves state-of-the-art performance among geometry-constrained methods while remaining competitive with approaches relying on geometric localization.

Wenyuan Xie, Mengyang Hong, Yongzhong Wang +9

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Southern University of Science and Technology · Xinjiang University of Finance and Economics +1

Robot Navigation Vision-Language Navigation Robot Localization

Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

Universal Navigation Interface: Robot-Free Data for Wheeled Robot Navigation

Collecting real-world navigation data for mobile robots typically requires platform-specific teleoperation, making large-scale collection expensive and difficult to scale. We introduce Universal Navigation Interface (UNI), a robot-free data collection paradigm that uses a four-wheeled rollator walker (rollator) and smartphone to collect physically constrained human demonstrations. Because the rollator cannot climb stairs, negotiate uncut curbs, or pass through narrow gaps, demonstrations are naturally biased toward wheeled-feasible routes. Using UNI, we collect 37.2 km of real-world navigation data and recover metric trajectories that directly supervise goal-conditioned navigation models. Fine-tuning visual-navigation models on UNI reduces trajectory prediction error by 17.4-24.8% on held-out UNI demonstrations. Evaluation on other navigation datasets shows benefits that vary by dataset and metric. We further demonstrate closed-loop transfer to a powered wheelchair in curb, staircase, and curb-cut scenarios. These results support low-cost physical proxies as a practical source of navigation supervision collected without the target robot.

Sarvesh Prajapati, Ananya Trivedi, Lorena Maria Genua +3

Institute for Experiential Robotics, Northeastern University, Boston, MA. · Khoury College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, Seattle, WA, USA.

Visual Navigation Robotic Data Collection Robot Navigation Robot Imitation Learning

Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

Feeling Terrain Before Crossing: World Models for Off-Road Navigation

Navigation world models plan by foresight, predicting the future that each candidate action sequence produces and selecting the best, rather than mapping observations to actions directly. Unlike urban settings where a predicted scene is a sufficient proxy, off-road navigation hinges on the robot--terrain interaction, so the prediction must cover not only what the camera will see but what the robot will feel. However, existing scene-focused models do not predict how much the robot will slip, tilt or shake along a planned trajectory. Proprioception captures these dynamics directly and, when used as input, improves the prediction of the physical future. We present Feel-WM, the first off-road navigation world model that conditions on proprioception and predicts what the robot will feel alongside what the camera will see. The physical future takes the form of a future proprioceptive state and a failure risk, both learned from the robot's own experience without human labels. The planner rolls out the physical future alongside the scene and weighs the predicted failure risk against goal similarity in a separable score. Experiments on real off-road data and in simulation demonstrate that Feel-WM outperforms visual-only navigation world models in open-loop planning and closed-loop rough-terrain navigation across wheeled and legged platforms. Deployed on a Husky on mountain trails, Feel-WM plans onboard, predicts rough ground ahead and steers around it, completing courses that an end-to-end policy fails.

E-In Son, Dong-Wook Kim, Ji-Hoon Hwang +4

Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Seoul National University, Republic of Korea

Off-Road Robot Navigation Robot Navigation World Models World Model-Based Planning Terrain-Aware Robot Locomotion Model-Based Planning+1

Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

TADreamer: Zero-Shot Language-Guided 3D Navigation for Terrestrial-Aerial Bimodal Robots via Video Imagination

Language-guided navigation for terrestrial-aerial bimodal robots requires selecting routes and locomotion modes that match scene context and task intent. Generated videos can represent such motion sequences, but recovering metrically consistent navigation references from them is challenging because of scale ambiguity and axis-dependent geometric distortions. We present TADreamer, a zero-shot framework that grounds video-imagined navigation in measured geometry without task-specific training or fine-tuning. A vision-language model translates onboard observations and instructions into navigation prompts, selects valid generated videos, and provides corrective feedback when regeneration is needed. The selected video is reconstructed into 3D waypoints annotated with terrestrial or aerial modes. A two-stage calibration procedure uses field-of-view constraints to initialize scale estimation, then refines axis-dependent scales, rotation, and translation by registering the reconstructed point cloud to measured geometry. The calibrated waypoints and mode labels guide a planner that incorporates measured geometry for robot execution. Real-world experiments demonstrate navigation across seven indoor and outdoor scenarios. With five candidates per round, usable videos are obtained within two rounds in all seven scenarios. On the calibration observations, our method reduces mean absolute depth error by 87.7% and mean absolute relative depth error by 86.3% compared with NavDreamer.

Xiangyu Li, Tiancheng Lai, Xijie Huang +7

State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China · Huzhou Institute of Zhejiang University, Huzhou 313000, China · Institute of Cyber-Systems and Control, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310027, China

Aerial Robotics Robot Navigation Vision-Language Navigation

Sep 17, 2026cs.RO

Tele-Traversability: Rethinking Traversability for Teleoperated Ground Robots in Terrain Navigation

Teleoperation, a human-in-the-loop control scheme, allows a human operator to remotely command and guide a mobile robot to navigate in off-road environments, yet fluent and user-friendly tele-navigation requires an alignment of traversability evaluation between human and robot. In the teleoperation system, the human operator typically utilizes off-site incomplete and delayed feedback via a human-machine interface to make a judgment of traversability, while the robot makes such an evaluation based on in situ onboard sensory information, which could cause divergent traversability estimation and thus generate mismatched decisions and actions. Existing approaches for traversability modeling, estimation, and prediction are mainly derived from the view of robots, i.e., robot-centric, and are practically suitable for fully autonomous mobile robots, but neglect the influence of human operators. To address this problem, this paper extends the concept of traversability from robot-centric to human-centric by accounting for the operator's cognitive states, such as attention, workload, and risk tolerance or awareness, termed tele-traversability. We first revisit the definitions and roles of traversability in robotics and then extend them to teleoperation settings. Finally, we highlight future trends and open challenges of tele-traversability toward human-centric teleoperation systems.

Lewei Feng, Qi Chen, Wenshuo Wang +6

School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, China · School of Mechanical Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China · Faculty of Marine Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, China +5

Embodied Navigation Robot Navigation Robot Teleoperation

Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

SemSafe-3DGS: Semantic Risk-Aware Active Navigation in Uncertain 3D Gaussian Splatting Maps

Autonomous robots operating in partially observed environments must navigate safely while acquiring observations that improve future planning. Existing safety formulations generally reason primarily about geometry. Consequently, geometrically similar scene elements may induce comparable control responses despite having different semantic consequences. We present a semantic risk aware safe-active perception framework for navigation in attributed 3D Gaussian maps. Semantic attributes modulate an Average Value-at-Risk collision clearance model through class dependent risk weights, allowing safety-critical Gaussian primitives to receive greater influence in the composite barrier. The resulting weighted clearances are aggregated into a control barrier function, while a trajectory-relevant active perception barrier promotes observations that reduce geometric map uncertainty along the robot's anticipated motion. Both objectives are integrated in a unified CBF-QP that enforces semantic risk-aware collision avoidance as a hard constraint while relaxing information acquisition when it conflicts with safety or task progress. Experiments demonstrate efficient safety constraint, improved navigation through active perception, semantic dependent trajectory adaptation, and real-robot execution under Ackermann dynamics.

Amirhossein Mollaei Khass, Athanasios Cosse, Nader Motee

Department of Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, 18015, USA

3D Gaussian Splatting Robot Navigation Control Barrier Functions Safe Robot Navigation

Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

Learning Safe Humanoid Navigation from Reduced Order Models

Research in humanoid robotics has achieved rapid progress in locomotion, and recent results have pushed the boundary on autonomous navigation. We demonstrate that a standard single-stage RL navigation pipeline struggles to scale to multi-level and multi-story terrain, limited by the difficulty of complex humanoid terrain interactions such as stairs. To overcome this challenge, we decompose the navigation problem into two pieces. First, we train a policy operating on the reduced order dynamics but with full 3D LiDAR observations to navigate complex, multi-story terrain. We then utilize this navigation knowledge to kickstart a policy operating on the full-order humanoid dynamics, with a frozen locomotion policy in the loop. Additionally, we demonstrate that applying a Poisson safety filter to the navigation policy output recovers safety in the presence of out-of-distribution obstacles, without dropping navigation success rate. We demonstrate the resulting RoM-Nav policy on a Unitree G1, accomplishing mapless multi-floor navigation covering trials with over 10m of vertical displacement and over 100m of path length. Project page with videos https://wdc3iii.github.io/rom-nav/ .

William D. Compton, Zachary Olkin, Ryan Bena +1

Department of Computing and Mathematical Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA · Amazon Safe Autonomy Frontiers (SAF) Lab

Robot Policy Learning Robot Navigation Safe Robot Navigation

Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

WAVE-Go: World-Model Navigation with Adaptive Execution for Wheel-Legged Robots

World models can anticipate the consequences of navigation actions, but predicted action sequences may become invalid during execution, especially when wheel-legged robots encounter dynamic obstacles or change locomotion modes. We propose WAVE-Go, an image-goal navigation framework that separates world-action prediction from interruptible command execution. Its executor adaptively selects an action prefix and cancels pending commands when updated observations invalidate execution. A conditional-risk formulation specifies prefix selection under an estimated cumulative failure budget, while posture and locomotion-mode transitions require clearance, stability, and task-evidence checks. In the reported navigation evaluation, WAVE-Go achieves 74.1% in-distribution success and 63.3% dynamic out-of-distribution success, exceeding the strongest baseline by 4.7 and 7.7 percentage points, respectively, while reducing collisions from 4.4 to 2.9 per 100 m. Compared with interruptible fixed four-command execution, WAVE-Go raises success by 4.0 percentage points while reducing replanning frequency by 51.2% and collision rate by 6.5%. Execution ablations also show that runtime interruption improves success, collision rate, and reaction latency at the cost of additional replanning. These results support adaptive, interruptible execution as a means of balancing navigation performance and planning overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/vigorlee/wave-go.

Mingyi Li, Ji Li, Zhihao Ouyang +2

Beijing Institute of Technology · The University of Hong Kong · GAC R&D Center +2

Visual Navigation World Models for Robotics Robot Navigation Safe Robot Navigation Image-Goal Navigation

Sep 15, 2026cs.RO

Map2Route: Benchmarking Compositional Language-Grounded Route Planning over Semantic Maps

We introduce Map2Route, a human-curated benchmark for compositional language-grounded route planning over pre-built semantic maps. Map2Route contains 1,000 episodes across 40 scenes, where instructions use relational, comparative, and nested descriptions to identify route-relevant objects and regions, while specifying ordered must-pass regions, must-avoid requirements, five categories of soft preferences, and spatial and route-stage scopes, which is partially tested by existing works. Alongside Map2Route, we propose Grounding2Route, which combines executable code-as-grounding with verification-guided repair and scope-aware planning.Across seven representative adapted baselines, Grounding2Route substantially outperforms existing methods in all metrics. Despite these gains, a substantial gap to human demonstrations remains, highlighting the difficulty of Map2Route and the considerable headroom for future progress. Additional qualitative results and resources are available on https://anonymous.4open.science/w/Map2Route-F05F/.

Muyi Bao, Hang Xu, Jingfan Tang +5

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639798

Robot Navigation Robot Task Planning

Sep 15, 2026cs.RO

DRT&R: Direct Radar Teach & Repeat

Radar-based navigation is appealing for its robustness to adverse conditions involving airborne particles, such as precipitation, dust, fog, and smoke, that can cause lidar-based systems to fail. Recently, direct methods that retain and use the entire radar scan rather than sparse points have improved on-road global localization performance. However, they have yet to be deployed in off-road environments or in closed-loop systems. Additionally, even direct global maps may lose information: their global nature leads to a smoothing out of viewpoint-dependent radar artifacts, which can provide pose information when mapping and localization occur along similar trajectories. This paper introduces Direct Radar Teach & Repeat (DRT&R): a direct spinning radar-based navigation stack that maximizes the amount of retained information by combining direct radar processing with local mapping. DRT&R yields state-of-the-art (SOTA) localization performance in both on-road and off-road environments. Using 344 km of on-road data and 20 km of off-road data, DRT&R is able to localize to within 4 cm in most on-road and off-road conditions, and 12 cm in geometrically degenerate and sparse environments. DRT&R is also evaluated autonomously in closed loop with an MPC controller for more than 10 km using a Clearpath Warthog off-road vehicle, demonstrating that it runs in real time and achieves SOTA tracking performance for off-road radar navigation.

Alexander Krawciw, Daniil Lisus, Cedric Le Gentil +1

Robotics Institute, University of Toronto, Canada · Mobile Robotics Lab, ETH Zürich, Switzerland

Off-Road Robot Navigation Embodied Navigation Robot Navigation Map-Based Localization Robot Localization

Sep 15, 2026cs.RO

Continual Learning for Traversability Prediction with Uncertainty-Aware Adaptation

Traversability prediction is a critical component of autonomous navigation in unstructured environments, where complex and uncertain robot-terrain interactions pose significant challenges such as traction loss and dynamic instability. Despite recent progress in learning-based traversability prediction, these methods often fail to adapt to novel terrains. Even when adaptation is achieved, retaining experience from previously trained environments remains a challenge, a problem known as catastrophic forgetting. To address this challenge, we propose a continual learning framework for traversability prediction that incrementally adapts to new terrains using a generative experience recall model. A key virtue of the proposed framework is two folds: i) retain prior experience without storing past data; and ii) incorporate the uncertainty of the generated samples from the recall model, enabling uncertainty-aware adaptation. Real-world experiments with a skid-steering robot validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, demonstrating its ability to adapt across a series of diverse environments while mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

Hojin Lee, Yunho Lee, Daniel A Duecker +1

Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, Ulsan, 44919, Republic of Korea · Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany

Continual Robot Learning Robot Navigation Replay-Based Continual Learning