arXiv Machine Learning

RangeNav: Task-Aligned LiDAR Range-Image Pretraining for Robot Navigation

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

MILER: Semantic Mid-Level Representation for Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning in Unstructured Autonomous Driving

MILER is an end‑to‑end reinforcement learning framework that achieves zero‑shot sim‑to‑real transfer for autonomous driving in unstructured environments. It uses a custom semantic mid‑level representation (MLR) simulator for offline training, and during deployment it processes real camera and LiDAR data with BEVFusion to produce a compatible bird’s‑eye‑view representation. The policy’s actions are applied via a trajectory‑alignment strategy, allowing the system to drive 17.3 km on a 3.0 km test track without human intervention, all running on a Jetson AGX Orin.

By Thomas Steinecker, Denis Trescher, Alexander Bienemann, Thorsten Luettel, Mirko Maehlisch
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
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 Computer Vision
Sep 25

M3GD: Multi-Modal Multi-View Geometric Diffusion for Camera--LiDAR Novel View Synthesis

M3GD introduces a multimodal representation that fuses pre‑trained 2D image and 3D LiDAR foundation models for robotic novel view synthesis, avoiding the need for a separate cross‑modal translator. By projecting LiDAR onto the image latent grid and injecting the resulting geometry‑aware packets via a lightweight residual adapter, the method enhances both RGB and depth synthesis on the GrandTour dataset compared to an image‑only baseline. Ablation studies confirm that pixel‑aligned LiDAR content drives the performance gains, and real‑world deployment on a ground robot demonstrates a tunable quality–cost trade‑off.

By Yang Zhou, Jiuhong Xiao, Shizhao Ye, Long Quang, Carlos Nieto-Granda, Giuseppe Loianno
arXiv AI
Jun 3

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.

By Zian Liu, Andong Yang, Chunkai Yang, Ruidong An, Chao Gao, Guyue Zhou
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 30

PhysWAM: Physically Consistent World Action Model for Autonomous Driving

PhysWAM is a unified world-action model for autonomous driving that jointly denoises multiview video, metric depth, and ego motion using a flow‑matching transformer. It introduces Coupled Point Projection (CPP), a geometric constraint that aligns generated depth points with LiDAR data after applying the predicted SE(3) ego motion, thereby enforcing physical consistency. At inference, trajectory selection uses a simple label‑free consensus rule, and the model demonstrates strong planning performance, zero‑shot transfer to unseen environments, and accurate, temporally coherent depth and video predictions.

By Dhruv Parikh, Fengcheng Yu, Quankai Gao, Jiawei Yang, Junjie Ye, Maulik Bhatt, Thang Vu, Charles Ochoa, Rowan McAllister, Igor Vasiljevic, Rajgopal Kannan, Viktor Prasanna, Vitor Guizilini, Yue Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 8

SearchWorld: Spatial Value-Grounded Imagination for UAV Object Search via World Models

SearchWorld introduces a recurrent state‑space world model that couples explicit spatial memory with value‑guided imagination for UAV object search. The model maintains bird’s‑eye‑view exploration and obstacle memory, decodes a task‑aware spatial value layer, and uses a cognition‑action network to improve policy through imagined rollouts without a separate critic. Experiments on UAV‑ON show a 23.8% success rate, surpassing the best published agent (19.5%) and achieving 35.5% oracle success while remaining robust on unseen scenes.

By Yatai Ji, Zhengqiu Zhu, Yong Zhao, Yue Hu, Fanglong Yao, Chen Gao, Pengfei Zhu, Quanjun Yin