English

MDE-AgriVLN: Agricultural Vision-and-Language Navigation with Monocular Depth Estimation

Robotics 2026-01-05 v3

Abstract

Agricultural robots are serving as powerful assistants across a wide range of agricultural tasks, nevertheless, still heavily relying on manual operations or railway systems for movement. The AgriVLN method and the A2A benchmark pioneeringly extended Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) to the agricultural domain, enabling a robot to navigate to a target position following a natural language instruction. Unlike human binocular vision, most agricultural robots are only given a single camera for monocular vision, which results in limited spatial perception. To bridge this gap, we present the method of Agricultural Vision-and-Language Navigation with Monocular Depth Estimation (MDE-AgriVLN), in which we propose the MDE module generating depth features from RGB images, to assist the decision-maker on multimodal reasoning. When evaluated on the A2A benchmark, our MDE-AgriVLN method successfully increases Success Rate from 0.23 to 0.32 and decreases Navigation Error from 4.43m to 4.08m, demonstrating the state-of-the-art performance in the agricultural VLN domain. Code: https://github.com/AlexTraveling/MDE-AgriVLN.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.03958,
  title  = {MDE-AgriVLN: Agricultural Vision-and-Language Navigation with Monocular Depth Estimation},
  author = {Xiaobei Zhao and Xingqi Lyu and Xin Chen and Xiang Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.03958},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:08:00.509Z