Robot Navigation

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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

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

Relational Semantic Reasoning on 3D Scene Graphs for Open World Interactive Object Search
Mar 5, 2026Imen Mahdi, Matteo Cassinelli, Fabien Despinoy +2Robotic Object Search Robot Navigation
University of Freiburg · Toyota Motor Europe
Safe-SAGE: Social-Semantic Adaptive Guidance for Safe Engagement through Laplace-Modulated Poisson Safety Functions
Mar 5, 2026Lizhi Yang, Ryan M. Bena, Meg Wilkinson +4Robot Navigation Control Barrier Functions
Caltech MCE · Tufts ME
OpenFrontier: General Navigation with Visual-Language Grounded Frontiers
Mar 5, 2026Esteban Padilla-Cerdio, Boyang Sun, Marc Pollefeys +1Robot Navigation Vision-Language Navigation
1ETH Zurich · 2Microsoft Spatial AI Lab · University of Bonn
Direct Contact-Tolerant Motion Planning With Vision Language Models
Mar 5, 2026He Li, Jian Sun, Chengyang Li +4Contact-Aware Motion Planning Robot Navigation
State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City (SKL-IOTSC), University of Macau, Macau, China. · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China. · Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT), Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China.
Sim2Sea: Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer for Maritime Vessel Navigation in Congested Waters
Mar 4, 2026Xinyu Cui, Xuanfa Jin, Xue Yan +7Sim-to-Real Transfer Robot Navigation
Institute of Automation, CAS School of Artificial Intelligence, UCAS Beijing, China · Institute of Automation, CAS Beijing, China · Zhongguancun Academy Beijing, China +1
RVN-Bench: A Benchmark for Reactive Visual Navigation
Mar 4, 2026Jaewon Lee, Jaeseok Heo, Gunmin Lee +3Robot Navigation Benchmarks Robot Navigation
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University (SNU) and Automation and Systems Research Institute (ASRI) and Sequor Robotics Inc., Seoul, Korea (Republic of). · Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Seoul National University (SNU) and Automation and Systems Research Institute (ASRI), Seoul, Korea (Republic of). · Interdisciplinary Program in Artificial Intelligence, Seoul National University (SNU) and Automation and Systems Research Institute (ASRI) and Sequor Robotics Inc., Seoul, Korea (Republic of). +1
MRPoS: Mixed Reality-Based Robot Navigation Interface Using Spatial Pointing and Speech with Large Language Model
Mar 4, 2026Eduardo Iglesius, Masato Kobayashi, Yuki UranishiRobot Navigation Human-Robot Interaction
The University of Osaka · Kobe University
Efficient Autonomous Navigation of a Quadruped Robot in Underground Mines on Edge Hardware
Mar 4, 2026Yixiang Gao, Kwame Awuah-OffeiQuadruped Robot Navigation Robot Navigation
Department of Mining and Explosive Engineering, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, USA
Navigating in Uncertain Environments with Heterogeneous Visibility
Mar 3, 2026Jongann Lee, Melkior OrnikRobot Navigation Informative Path Planning
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Urbana, IL 61801, USA.
DreamFlow: Local Navigation Beyond Observation via Conditional Flow Matching in the Latent Space
Mar 3, 2026Jiwon Park, Dongkyu Lee, I Made Aswin Nahrendra +2Robot Navigation
Robotics Program, KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Daejeon 34141, South Korea. · School of Electrical Engineering, KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), Daejeon 34141, South Korea. · URobotics, Seoul, South Korea. +2
A Robust Simulation Framework for Verification and Validation of Autonomous Maritime Navigation in Adverse Weather and Constrained Environments
Mar 3, 2026Mayur S. Patil, Nataraj Sudharsan, Anthony S. Saaiby +9Robot Navigation Robotics Simulation
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA · Department of Ocean Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA · American Bureau of Shipping, Spring, TX, USA
Learning Vision-Based Omnidirectional Navigation: A Teacher-Student Approach Using Monocular Depth Estimation
Mar 2, 2026Jan Finke, Wayne Paul Martis, Adrian Schmelter +3Robot Navigation Vision-Based Robot Control
SaferPath: Hierarchical Visual Navigation with Learned Guidance and Safety-Constrained Control
Mar 2, 2026Lingjie Zhang, Zeyu Jiang, Changhao ChenVisual Robot Navigation Robot Navigation
PEAK-Lab, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, 511453, China
SSMG-Nav: Enhancing Lifelong Object Navigation with Semantic Skeleton Memory Graph
Mar 2, 2026Haochen Niu, Lantao Zhang, Xingwu Ji +3Robot Navigation Object-Goal Navigation
Brain-Inspired Application Technology Center (BATC), Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China
SFCo-Nav: Efficient Zero-Shot Visual Language Navigation via Collaboration of Slow LLM and Fast Attributed Graph Alignment
Mar 2, 2026Chaoran Xiong, Litao Wei, Xinhao Hu +5Vision-Language Navigation Robot Navigation
The authors are with the Shanghai Key Laboratory of Navigation and Location Based Services, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU), Shanghai 200240, China. · Litao Wei is also with Zhiyuan College, SJTU. · Ling Pei is also with the State Key Laboratory of Submarine Geoscience, SJTU.
Test-Driven Agentic Framework for Reliable Robot Controller
Feb 28, 2026Shivanshu Tripathi, Reza Akbarian Bafghi, Maziar RaissiRobotic Control Code Generation
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Riverside · Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder · Department of Mathematics, University of California, Riverside
EgoMoD: Predicting Global Maps of Dynamics from Local Egocentric Observations
Feb 26, 2026Iacopo Catalano, David Morilla-Cabello, Jorge Pena-Queralta +1Robot Navigation World Models for Robotics
I. Catalano is with the University of Turku, Finland. · E. Montijano and D. Morilla-Cabello are with the Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón, Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain. · J. Peña-Queralta is with the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, Zürich University of Applied Sciences, Winterthur, Switzerland.
SCOPE: Skeleton Graph-Based Computation-Efficient Framework for Autonomous UAV Exploration
Feb 26, 2026Kai Li, Shengtao Zheng, Linkun Xiu +4Autonomous Robot Exploration Robot Navigation
Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen 518055, China · School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore 639956
Dream-SLAM: Dreaming the Unseen for Active SLAM in Dynamic Environments
Feb 25, 2026Xiangqi Meng, Pengxu Hou, Zhenjun Zhao +4Simultaneous Localization and Mapping Visual SLAM
Thrust of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), Guangzhou, China. · University of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain. · School of Computation, Information and Technology, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany. +1
Vector Fields for Path Following on Lie Groups with Application in Robot Control
Feb 25, 2026Felipe Bartelt, Luciano C. A. Pimenta, Weijia Yao +1Robotic Control Lie Group Methods
Chasing Ghosts: A Simulation-to-Real Olfactory Navigation Stack with Optional Vision Augmentation
Feb 23, 2026Kordel K. France, Ovidiu Daescu, Latifur Khan +1Robot Navigation UAV Navigation
Dept. of Computer Science University of Texas at Dallas Richardson, TX, USA
Understanding Fire Through Thermal Radiation Fields for Mobile Robots
Feb 22, 2026Anton R. Wagner, Madhan Balaji Rao, Xuesu Xiao +1Mobile Robotics Robot Navigation
Department of Computer Science, Kiel University, Germany · Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, USA
Learning to Localize Reference Trajectories in Image-Space for Visual Navigation
Feb 21, 2026Finn Lukas Busch, Matti Vahs, Quantao Yang +4Robot Trajectory Tracking Robot Navigation
Division of Robotics, Perception, and Learning, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, and also affiliated with Digital Futures
Decentralized and Fully Onboard: Range-Aided Cooperative Localization and Navigation on Micro Aerial Vehicles
Feb 18, 2026Abhishek Goudar, Angela P. SchoelligCooperative Localization Robot Navigation
The authors are with the Learning Systems and Robotics Lab at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, and the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies, Canada. They are also affiliated with the University of Toronto Robotics Institute, the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI), and the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence.
When Remembering and Planning are Worth it: Navigating under Change
Feb 17, 2026Omid Madani, J. Brian Burns, Reza Eghbali +1Robot Navigation Memory-Augmented Agents
The authors were partially affiliated with Brown University.
LongNav-R1: Horizon-Adaptive Multi-Turn RL for Long-Horizon VLA Navigation
Feb 12, 2026Yue Hu, Avery Xi, Qixin Xiao +4Robot Navigation Vision-Language Navigation
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
ReaDy-Go: Real-to-Sim Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting Simulation for Environment-Specific Visual Navigation with Moving Obstacles
Feb 12, 2026Seungyeon Yoo, Youngseok Jang, Dabin Kim +3Robotics Simulation Robot Navigation
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea · InnoCORE AI-Transformed Aerospace Research Center, KAIST, Daejeon, Republic of Korea
Insect-inspired Visual Point-goal Navigation
Jan 23, 2026Yihe Lu, Barbara WebbVisual Navigation Embodied Navigation
School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom · University of Glasgow, Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom
Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation
Dec 24, 2025Yu He, Da Huang, Zhenyang Liu +53D Scene Prediction Robot Navigation
Fudan University · Shanghai Innovation Institute · ActiMind +3
Learning Category-level Last-meter Navigation from RGB Demonstrations of a Single-instance
Dec 11, 2025Tzu-Hsien Lee, Fidan Mahmudova, Karthik DesinghRobot Skill Learning Robot Navigation
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Mar 5, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

Relational Semantic Reasoning on 3D Scene Graphs for Open World Interactive Object Search

Imen Mahdi, Matteo Cassinelli, Fabien Despinoy, Tim Welschehold+1

University of Freiburg · Toyota Motor Europe

Robotic Object Search Robot Navigation 3D Scene Understanding

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Open-world interactive object search in household environments requires understanding semantic relationships between objects and their surrounding context to guide exploration efficiently. Prior methods either rely on vision-language embeddings similarity, which does not reliably capture task-relevant relational semantics, or large language models (LLMs), which are too slow and costly for real-time deployment. We introduce SCOUT: Scene Graph-Based Exploration with Learned Utility for Open-World Interactive Object Search, a novel method that searches directly over 3D scene graphs by assigning utility scores to rooms, frontiers, and objects using relational exploration heuristics such as room-object containment and object-object co-occurrence. To make this practical without sacrificing open-vocabulary generalization, we propose an offline procedural distillation framework that extracts structured relational knowledge from LLMs into lightweight models for on-robot inference. Furthermore, we present SymSearch, a scalable symbolic benchmark for evaluating semantic reasoning in interactive object search tasks. Extensive evaluations across symbolic and simulation environments show that SCOUT outperforms embedding similarity-based methods and matches LLM-level performance while remaining computationally efficient. Finally, real-world experiments demonstrate effective transfer to physical environments, enabling open-world interactive object search under realistic sensing and navigation constraints.