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

CardsList

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

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

    Mar 15, 2026Prithvi Jai Ramesh, Kaustav Chanda, Krishna Vinod +3RGB-Event Sensor FusionRobot Navigation

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

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

    Mar 15, 2026Shaojun Cai, Nuwan Janaka, Ashwin Ram +4Visually Impaired Navigation AssistanceAssistive Robotics

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

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

    Mar 14, 2026Jeni Shahi, Abhishek Shah, A. S. M. Ahsanul Sarkar AkibRobot NavigationRobotics Education

    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

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

    Mar 14, 2026Mateo Haro, Julia Richter, Fan Yang +2Robot NavigationRobot Motion Planning

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

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

    Mar 14, 2026Jie Chen, Yuxin Cai, Yizhuo Wang +5Robot NavigationVision-Language Navigation

    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

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

    Mar 14, 2026Yutong Zhang, Shaiv Y. Mehra, Bradley S. Duerstock +1Robot NavigationSocial Robot Navigation

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

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

    Mar 13, 2026Junhe Sheng, Ruofei Bai, Kuan Xu +5Robot NavigationRobot Policy Adaptation

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

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

    Mar 13, 2026Zunzhi You, Yunke Wang, Haolan Guo +1Robot Policy LearningRobot Navigation

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

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

    Mar 13, 2026Zeying Gong, Yangyi Zhong, Yiyi Ding +6Robot Navigation BenchmarksRobot Policy Learning

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

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

    Mar 12, 2026Gal Versano, Itzik KleinRobot NavigationUnscented Kalman Filtering

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

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

    Mar 10, 2026Katya M. Papais, Wenda Zhao, Timothy D. BarfootEmbodied NavigationRobot Navigation

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

  12. BEACON: Language-Conditioned Navigation Affordance Prediction under Occlusion

    Mar 10, 2026Xinyu Gao, Gang Chen, Javier Alonso-MoraRobot NavigationVision-Language Navigation

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

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

    Mar 10, 2026Pooria Roy, Nourhan Jadallah. Tomer Lapid, Shahzaib Ahmad +2Robot NavigationOn-Device Inference

    Queen’s University

  14. LLMs for Text-Based Exploration and Navigation Under Partial Observability

    Mar 10, 2026Stephan Sandfuchs, Maximilian Melchert, Jörg FrochteLanguage Model-Based ControlRobot Navigation

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

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

    Mar 10, 2026Shiyi Chen, Mingye Yang, Haiyi Liu +6Quadruped Robot NavigationRobot Navigation

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

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

    Mar 10, 2026Jiang Gao, Xiangyu Dong, Haozhou Li +3Indoor Robot NavigationEmbodied Navigation

    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

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

    Mar 9, 2026Yuanjie Lu, Beichen Wang, Zhengqi Wu +4Robot NavigationRobot Policy Generalization

    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

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

    Mar 9, 2026Matěj Boxan, Gabriel Jeanson, Alexander Krawciw +5Simultaneous Localization and MappingRobotic Data Collection

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

  19. EndoSERV: A Vision-based Endoluminal Robot Navigation System

    Mar 9, 2026Junyang Wu, Fangfang Xie, Minghui Zhang +4Robot NavigationRobot Localization

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

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

    Mar 9, 2026Yudai Noda, Kanji TanakaRobot NavigationObject-Goal Navigation

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

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

    Mar 9, 2026Junyang Wu, Mingyi Luo, Fangfang Xie +7Robot NavigationRobotic Endoscopy

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

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

    Mar 8, 2026Zhaochen J. Xu, Juntao He, Delfin Aydan +5Legged RoboticsRobot Navigation

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

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

    Mar 8, 2026Dongjin Cho, Miryeong Park, Juhui Lee +2Robot Traversability EstimationRobotic Perception

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

  24. A Contrastive Fewshot RGBD Traversability Segmentation Framework for Indoor Robotic Navigation

    Mar 6, 2026Qiyuan An, Tuan Dang, Fillia MakedonIndoor Robot NavigationSemantic Segmentation

    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

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

    Mar 6, 2026Quang-Anh N. D., Duc Pham, Minh-Anh Nguyen +2Robot Navigation

    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

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

    Mar 6, 2026Haokun Zhu, Zongtai Li, Zihan Liu +8Robot NavigationObject-Goal Navigation

    Carnegie Mellon University · New York University · Nanyang Technological University

  27. DreamToNav: Generalizable Navigation for Robots via Generative Video Planning

    Mar 6, 2026Valerii Serpiva, Jeffrin Sam, Chidera Simon +4Robot NavigationVisual Robot Navigation

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

  28. MagRobot:An Open Simulator for Magnetically Navigated Robots

    Mar 6, 2026Heng Wang, Haoyu Song, Jiatao Zheng +2Robotics SimulationRobotics

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

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

    Mar 6, 2026Jiefu Zhang, Yang Xu, Vaneet AggarwalSafe Robot NavigationRobot Navigation

    Purdue University, USA

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

    Mar 6, 2026Sijia Li, Haoyu Wang, Shenghai Yuan +2Quadruped Robot NavigationRobot Navigation