Overview

Visual navigation studies how robots and embodied agents use images, video, depth, or event-camera data to locate themselves, understand surroundings, and move toward goals while avoiding obstacles. Approaches range from mapping and geometric planning to vision-language policies, traversability estimation, and world models that predict future views and actions; systems are tested in settings such as Habitat and R2R as well as on real robots. Current work explores long-horizon planning, interaction with people and objects, adaptation across platforms, and efficient deployment on limited hardware. A central challenge is making success reliable under visual change and distribution shift, while evaluating safety, collisions, and real-world transfer rather than goal-reaching alone.

Latest papers

CardsList

71 papers9 papers in the last four weeks, level with the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Towards bio-inspired visual navigation: a neuromorphic navigation paradigm for MAVs

    Oct 15, 2026Junjie Jiang, Ankang Zhou, Zheng FangVisual NavigationUAV Navigation

  2. NavAble: A Large-Scale Dataset and Synthetic Data Generation Pipeline for Blind Navigation

    Oct 14, 2026Hochul Hwang, Jahir Sadik Monon, Soowan Yang +9Visually Impaired Navigation AssistanceAssistive Technology for Blind and Low-Vision People

  3. SkipWorld: Latent Skip Planning with Distilled World Models for Efficient Visual Navigation

    Oct 13, 2026Yifei Yang, Zehua Fan, Zike Yan +2Visual NavigationWorld Model-Based Planning

  4. Interactive Navigation Beyond Reachability: Benchmark and Agentic Framework

    Oct 12, 2026Delun Li, Xueyao Wei, Rui Chen +4Embodied NavigationVisual Navigation

  5. GuidedNav: Shaping Vision-Language Navigation Representations through Pre-action Attention and Spatial Guidance

    Oct 9, 2026Jingyu Guo, Jiaxin Huang, Chengxing Lin +6Vision-Language NavigationVisual Navigation

  6. Lifelong small-object navigation in changing object layouts: a benchmark and method

    Oct 7, 2026Jiagan Huang, Zikun Zhou, Zijian Ni +4Visual NavigationObject-Goal Navigation

  7. SiGNgapore - An Interactive Dataset for Sign-based Visual Navigation

    Oct 7, 2026Nicky Zimmerman, Joel Loo, Zishuo Wang +1Visual Robot NavigationRobot Navigation Benchmarks

  8. EdgeVLN: Runtime-Aware Deployment Ready Quantized Vision Language Navigation Model

    Sep 28, 2026Rithvik Jonna, Man Namgung, Aakash Gurram +1Visual NavigationVLM Quantization

  9. VCN-Bench: A Video-Contextualized Navigation Benchmark for Spatial Reasoning over Prior Visual Experience

    Sep 28, 2026Siqi Zhang, Meng Wei, Chenyang Wan +6Visual NavigationSpatial Reasoning Benchmarks

  10. ReVNM: Learning-Based Visual Navigation from a Remote Camera

    Sep 24, 2026Michikuni Eguchi, Kohei Honda, Masafumi Endo +2Visual NavigationRobot Navigation

  11. FLINT: Fast Lightweight Inference for Traversability

    Sep 22, 2026William Bonilla, Maxime Boisvert, David-Alexandre Poissant +2Robot Traversability EstimationOff-Road Robot Navigation

  12. Structured World-State Reasoning for Agentic Robotic Search

    Sep 20, 2026Finley R. Holt, Luis A. Pabon, John Irvin Alora +2Visual NavigationEmbodied Navigation

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

    Sep 17, 2026Sarvesh Prajapati, Ananya Trivedi, Lorena Maria Genua +3Visual NavigationRobotic Data Collection

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

    Sep 16, 2026Mingyi Li, Ji Li, Zhihao Ouyang +2Visual NavigationWorld Models for Robotics

  15. Map the Possibilities: Spatial Belief Fields for Language-Goal Aerial Navigation

    Sep 5, 2026Haotian Xu, Yue Hu, Zhengqiu Zhu +3Aerial VLNVisual Navigation

  16. CanonNav: Disentangling Navigation Behavior from Camera Geometry in Cross-Platform Visual Navigation

    Aug 31, 2026Dong-Wook Kim, Ji-Hoon Hwang, E-In Son +2Visual NavigationSafe Robot Navigation

  17. AirAlign: Geometry-Aware Relative Pose Alignment for UAV Last-Meter Navigation

    Aug 22, 2026Jinyi Zhou, Shuo Feng, Yufei Wu +1Relative Pose EstimationUAV Navigation

  18. Embodied-Navigator: Point, Think, Memorize, and Align for Efficient Navigation

    Aug 18, 2026Hongyan Feng, Sunlai Chen, Xuanyu Liu +9Embodied NavigationVision-Language Navigation

  19. OccPlanner: Goal-Aware Occupancy-Conditioned Diffusion Planner for PixelGoal Navigation

    Aug 14, 2026Binling Huang, Nianjin Ye, Xi Yang +6Visual NavigationTrajectory Generation

  20. Unordered Landmark Visual Navigation

    Aug 7, 2026Hao Ren, Junzhe Zhu, Yihan Li +8Visual NavigationRobot Navigation

  21. UniNav: A Unified World-Action Diffusion Model for Visual Navigation

    Aug 4, 2026Changqing Zhou, Yueru Luo, Zeyu Jiang +1Visual NavigationTrajectory Generation

  22. Safety-oriented sidewalk and road segmentation for smartphone-based assistive navigation

    Jul 23, 2026Hakan Calim, Anamaria Dumitrescu, Adarsh Bhandary Panambur +2Visual NavigationVisually Impaired Navigation Assistance

  23. Confidence-Gated Vision-Only Heading Alignment for UAV-UGV Cooperative Systems

    Jul 21, 2026Reza Ahmari, Vahid Hemmati, Parham Kebria +3Robotic ControlVisual Navigation

  24. Learning Adaptive Safety Margins for Visual Navigation

    Jul 20, 2026Junyi Hu, Shuaihang Yuan, Geeta Chandra Raju Bethala +2Visual NavigationTrajectory Generation

  25. Anticipate Before Acting: Future-State-Conditioned Vision-Language Navigation

    Jul 20, 2026Lingfeng Zhang, Zhanguang Zhang, Liheng Ma +2Visual NavigationVision-Language Navigation

  26. Self-Healing Visual Recovery for Autonomous Ground Vehicles Using Camera-Only Visual Odometry

    Jul 13, 2026Jakob Solberg Berntzen, Safia Fatima, Leon MoonenVisual NavigationRobot Navigation

  27. AdvNav: Behavior-Guided Black-Box Adversarial Attacks on Vision-Language Navigation

    Jul 13, 2026Chenyang Li, Kaige Li, Zeyu Jiang +1Visual NavigationVision-Language Navigation