The paper introduces a compact visual navigation system that decomposes the task into three analytically‑computed geometric interfaces and three small learned modules: an egress predictor, a navigation predictor, and an endpoint‑pinned residual diffusion generator. Only 0.58 M of the 23 M parameters are trained on 44 k frames, achieving competitive success rates and the lowest collision rate among evaluated methods across 6 060 point‑goal episodes in 60 environments. The design allows further parameter reduction by replacing the frozen image encoder with a 0.54 M MobileNetV2, supports zero‑shot deployment on a Jetson Orin Nano UGV, and enables transparent failure analysis under sensor corruption.
By Edward Beng Wai Tan, Siew-Kei Lam
AVALON is a topological navigation framework that enables zero‑shot indoor navigation for service robots in familiar but unmapped buildings. It relies on human‑seeded layered spatial memory, node‑verified execution, and task‑triggered human‑robot memory co‑updating, requiring only a floor plan, place clues, and an initial topology‑odometry alignment. Experiments on a Unitree Go2 robot show AVALON completing a 12.81 m mission in 46.4 s—40.9% faster than DimOS‑Go2—without any on‑site mapping.
By Jing Xia, Changyan Li, Yuduo Wang, Guiyin Tian, Bo Wang, Yifan Liao, Mingjun Li, Shiyan Hu
The paper investigates how inaccuracies in pretrained occupancy networks affect active mapping robots that select camera viewpoints to reconstruct unknown 3D scenes. By fixing the planner and varying the occupancy representation—ranging from no completion to ground‑truth occupancy—the authors find that correcting false positives or false negatives alone does not reliably improve coverage, highlighting a disconnect between occupancy accuracy and planning performance. They propose a dynamic filtering strategy that retains predictions in unexplored space while suppressing unsupported occupancy based on online observations, which preliminarily shows it can steer viewpoint selection toward reachable surfaces that would otherwise remain unseen.
By Jiahui Zhang, Gongbo Liang, Yu Zhang
arXiv:2606. 14879v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mobile agents require efficient exploration strategies to map unseen environments and autonomously plan tasks.
By Venkata Naren Devarakonda, Raktim Gautam Goswami, Prashanth Krishnamurthy, Farshad Khorrami
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:2609.16737v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Generative video models can serve as a promising backbone for robot navigation by predicting future observations as video plans. Recent approaches of...
By Hojin Lee, Sizhe Lester Li, Maximilian Hilger, Susie Lu, Achim J. Lilienthal, Vincent Sitzmann, Daniel A. Duecker
CueNav is a video model-based navigation framework that uses visual cues—a Bird's-Eye View map for global task context and a body-aware egocentric view for embodiment context—to guide a video planner. The framework couples this planner with an embodiment-specific Inverse-Dynamics Model that translates dense flow fields from the video plan into robot actions. Experiments show that CueNav nearly doubles maze navigation success compared to cue-less planning and achieves 70% success in narrow passages, while also supporting zero-shot semantic-conditioned navigation across different robot platforms.
By Hojin Lee, Sizhe Lester Li, Maximilian Hilger, Susie Lu, Achim J. Lilienthal, Vincent Sitzmann, Daniel A. Duecker
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: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: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:2610.17419v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Autonomous quadrotor flight in cluttered environment is an key capability for tasks like inspection and search. Navigation policies trained in simula...
By Aditya Azad, Arthur Huang, Guanrui Li
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.
By Wenyuan Xie, Mengyang Hong, Yongzhong Wang, Yanbiao Ji, Yijin Zhou, Shaokai Wu, Shalayiding Sirejiding, Huayi Zhou, Yi-Chao Chen, Ma Ling, Yue Ding, Hongtao Lu