arXiv:2512. 21201v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires robots to find target objects in unseen environments without task-specific fine-tuning or pre-built maps, a key capability for general-purpose service robots.
By Yu He, Da Huang, Zhenyang Liu, Zixiao Gu, Qiang Sun, Guangnan Ye, Yanwei Fu, Yu-Gang Jiang
The paper introduces Sampling-Guided Policy Search (SGPS), a method that combines sampling-based model‑predictive control with first‑order policy gradients to accelerate visual policy learning for locomotion and manipulation tasks. SGPS starts with behavior cloning from sampled actions and then alternates between sampling‑based refinement and short‑horizon policy updates under varied initial states and dynamics. The approach is demonstrated on simulated Unitree Go2 and G1 robots, learning tasks such as obstacle traversal and bimanual carrying, and the distilled policies transfer zero‑shot to a real Go2 robot using onboard depth perception.
By Yilang Liu, Haoxiang You, Qian Wang, Daniel Rakita, Ian Abraham
arXiv:2603. 03953v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe visual navigation is critical for indoor mobile robots operating in cluttered environments.
By Jaewon Lee, Jaeseok Heo, Gunmin Lee, Howoong Jun, Jeongwoo Oh, Songhwai Oh
The paper introduces UniWM, a unified, memory‑augmented world model that merges egocentric visual foresight and planning into a single multimodal autoregressive backbone. By grounding action selection in visually imagined outcomes and using a hierarchical memory to fuse short‑term perception with long‑term trajectory context, UniWM aligns prediction with control and improves navigation stability. Experiments on four challenging benchmarks and the 1X Humanoid Dataset show up to 30% higher success rates, reduced trajectory errors, zero‑shot generalization to unseen datasets, and scalability to high‑dimensional humanoid navigation.
By Yifei Dong, Fengyi Wu, Guangyu Chen, Lingdong Kong, Qiyu Hu, Yuxuan Zhou, Xu Zhu, Jingdong Sun, Jun-Yan He, Qi Dai, Alexander G. Hauptmann, Zhi-Qi Cheng
arXiv:2607. 20785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying navigation systems at scale requires a recipe that minimizes sensor assumptions, generalizes across robot embodiments, and trains efficiently.
By Arjun Majumdar, Avinash Sooriyarachchi, Benjamin Tibi, Chris Bamford, Elliot Chane-Sane, Guillaume Lample, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Ludovic Ho Fuh, Mathieu Poiree, Olivier Duchenne, Rosalie Millner, Srijan Mishra, Theo Cachet, Thomas Chabal
arXiv:2606. 18634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To locate a target object while exploring the unknown environment is a fundamental capability for autonomous agents, with applications ranging from search-and-rescue to field robots.
By Zecheng Yin, Benedict Jun Ma
arXiv:2603. 08862v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous navigation in highly constrained environments remains challenging for mobile robots.
By Yuanjie Lu, Beichen Wang, Zhengqi Wu, Yang Li, Xiaomin Lin, Chengzhi Mao, Xuesu Xiao
arXiv:2607. 07885v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Dynamic obstacle avoidance in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge for autonomous mobile robots, particularly when large-scale robot-specific training data and simulation-based policies are impractical.
By Erik Jagnandan, Mulugeta Haile, Gregory Barber, Pratik Chaudhari
arXiv:2603. 25937v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Visual Navigation Models (VNMs) promise generalizable, robot navigation by learning from large-scale visual demonstrations.
By Maeva Guerrier, Karthik Soma, Jana Pavlasek, Giovanni Beltrame
arXiv:2609.09158v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: We study the problem of navigating cluttered indoor environments with a humanoid robot. Unlike conventional methods that model navigation as a 2D pat...
By Anqi Li, Yuxin Chen, Zhaobo Li, Zhuo Cao, Junli Ren, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Dhruv Shah
The paper introduces a Latent World Model (LWM) for robot navigation that predicts action‑conditioned latent feature compatibility instead of reconstructing future observations. By exploiting the correlation between spatial proximity and latent feature similarity, the model evaluates action consequences directly in latent space and supports counterfactual training using sampled action sequences. The learned world model can supervise policy learning from unlabeled video and further improve policies via reinforcement learning entirely within the model, eliminating the need for action annotations and additional environment interaction.
By Zengmao Wang, Wei Gao, Shuhan Shen
arXiv:2609.39235v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: World models offer a promising way to help robots understand how the physical world evolves and plan complex behaviours through imagination. Yet exis...
By Ali Alrasheed, Basim Azam, Naveed Akhtar