arXiv AI

Predictive Training with Latent Imagination for Visual Quadruped Navigation

arXiv:2607. 17574v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement-learning navigation policies for legged robots select actions reactively from current observations and short-term memory, with limited capacity to anticipate how moving obstacles will evolve in the near future.

arXiv AI
Jun 15

Schr\"odinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

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
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Accelerating Visual Policy Learning with Sampling-Based Model Predictive Control

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 AI
Aug 19

Towards Unified World Models for Visual Navigation via Memory-Augmented Planning and Foresight

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 AI
Jul 24

Robostral Navigate

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 AI
Jul 10

Time-to-Collision Based Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance Using Pretrained Vision Models for Robots in Unstructured Environments

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 AI
Aug 28

Predicting Consequences and Reinforcing Navigation Policies with Latent World Models

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