New chip could help tiny robots traverse complex environments

Reachy Mini - The Open-Source Robot for Today's and Tomorrow's AI Builders

Could AI tell you where you left your keys?

A new spatial memory system for robots efficiently captures details about the objects they see while exploring their environment.

Navi-Agent: Unlocalized Monocular Navigation Agent

Navi-Agent is a zero‑shot Vision‑Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN‑CE) agent that builds a coordinate‑free spatial state from visual observations and motion history. It represents this state as a navigation topology with nodes as visual places and edges as motion transitions, enabling observation‑based self‑localization, task progress verification, and recovery. Experiments on a zero‑shot VLN‑CE benchmark and real‑world robot platforms demonstrate that Navi‑Agent achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance among geometry‑constrained methods while remaining competitive with geometry‑based approaches.

AirDreamer: Generalist Drone Navigation with World Models

arXiv:2606. 03252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Navigating a drone in unseen and cluttered environments requires reliable generalization to unseen scene layouts and understanding of environmental structure relative to the robot's capabilities.

NavVerse: Benchmarking Indoor-to-Outdoor Embodied Navigation in Continuous Robot Simulation

Robots deployed in delivery, campus, and emergency-response settings often need to navigate from buildings to streets within a single continuous episode. Existing benchmarks usually evaluate indoor and outdoor navigation separately, and many abstract away robot execution, leaving exit finding, boundary traversal, adaptation, and kinodynamic failures underexplored.

One MLLM, One Call: Efficient Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation via Spatial-Aware Waypoints

arXiv:2609.06476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments (VLN-CE) requires an embodied agent to navigate unseen environments by following natural la...

PixelLoop: Shortcut Topological Navigation with Pixel-Level Loops

arXiv:2607. 12811v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although topological mapping and navigation have been studied extensively, the specific role and downstream effect of loop closures in purely topological representations has received relatively little attention.

A Survey of Robotic Navigation and Manipulation with Physics Simulators in the Era of Embodied AI

arXiv:2505. 01458v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Navigation and manipulation are core capabilities in Embodied AI, but training agents to perform them directly in the real world is costly, time-consuming, and unsafe.

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.

LifelongCrossNav: Persistent 3D Semantic Memory for Cross-Floor Multi-Object Navigation

arXiv:2608. 07079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Object-goal navigation has made substantial progress in semantic perception and exploration, yet persistent memory for multi-object navigation and cross-floor navigation are still commonly addressed separately.

OptiSight: Bridging Semantic Reasoning and Geometric Control for Embodied Navigation

arXiv:2608.23354v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous indoor navigation requires both semantic understanding and precise geometric control. We propose OptiSight, a hybrid framework that combin...

IR-SIM: A Lightweight Declarative Simulator for Navigation Learning and Benchmarking

arXiv:2606.08729v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Developing navigation policies requires simulation scenarios that support repeatable training and evaluation. Despite the availability of num...