The paper presents a method that replaces human demonstrations with a single brief iPhone scan to adapt a language-guided navigation policy to new buildings. Scan2Instruction transforms the scan into a full training environment, automatically generating navigation episodes with grounded instructions. PRPT-KS then adapts the policy using a closed‑form Pareto utility derived from the reconstructed scene, achieving an 85% real‑robot success rate in five real environments, compared to 49% for a baseline trained on human demonstrations.
arXiv:2609.37591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Test-time adaptation for vision-language navigation (TTA-VLN) enables pretrained policies to adapt online to unseen environments using only test-time...
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.
arXiv:2607. 01754v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy exploration is a crucial component for training robust Vision-Language Navigation agents, as it exposes the policy to a broader state distribution.
SuperNav is a navigation system that leverages a pretrained multimodal large language model (MLLM) without fine‑tuning it for navigation. The system introduces an agent harness that delegates motion execution to navigation tools while the MLLM focuses on interpreting requests, understanding scenes, and making decisions. A visual‑point interface connects the model’s decisions to motion, allowing direct destination specification and feedback‑driven revision, enabling sustained navigation across varied tasks and environments.
UrbanVLA is a Vision‑Language‑Action framework designed to enable delivery robots to navigate large‑scale urban environments using long‑horizon route instructions. The model aligns noisy route waypoints with visual observations and plans trajectories, trained through a two‑stage pipeline of supervised fine‑tuning on simulated data and reinforcement fine‑tuning on mixed simulation and real‑world data. Experiments show UrbanVLA outperforms strong baselines by over 55% on the SocialNav task and demonstrates reliable real‑world navigation in large urban settings.
On-policy exploration is a crucial component for training robust Vision-Language Navigation agents, as it exposes the policy to a broader state distribution. However, such exploration inevitably leads to trajectories that deviate from expert demonstrations, resulting in a semantic mismatch between the executed visual stream and the original language instruction.
arXiv:2607. 10383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual Language Navigation foundation models aim to unify deep reasoning for grounded spatial decisions with broad versatility for diverse embodied tasks.
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.
arXiv:2603. 08862v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Autonomous navigation in highly constrained environments remains challenging for mobile robots.
arXiv:2607. 21400v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) enables embodied agents to follow natural-language instructions.
The paper presents a vision‑language navigation system that transfers from simulation to a real Ackermann‑steered mobile robot without relying on navigation graphs or panoramic views. It uses a Cross‑Modal Attention architecture trained on simulated data and fine‑tuned with limited real‑world episodes, leveraging linear photometric adjustments and a camera‑LiDAR sensor suite. Evaluation with SPL and nDTW metrics shows robust, adaptable navigation in continuous environments.
arXiv:2607. 11498v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models predict robot actions from visual observations and language instructions.