Related papers: ViKiNG: Vision-Based Kilometer-Scale Navigation wi…
Path-planning algorithms are an important part of a wide variety of robotic applications, such as mobile robot navigation and robot arm manipulation. However, in large search spaces in which local traps may exist, it remains challenging to…
Solving robotic navigation tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) is challenging due to their sparse reward and long decision horizon nature. However, in many navigation tasks, high-level (HL) task representations, like a rough floor plan,…
Image-goal navigation steers an agent to a target location specified by an image in unseen environments. Existing methods primarily handle this task by learning an end-to-end navigation policy, which compares the similarities of target and…
While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are set to transform robotic navigation, existing methods often underutilize their reasoning capabilities. To unlock the full potential of VLMs in robotics, we shift their role from passive observers to…
We present LoTIS, a model for visual navigation that provides robot-agnostic image-space guidance by localizing a reference RGB trajectory in the robot's current view, without requiring camera calibration, poses, or robot-specific training.…
We improve reliable, long-horizon, goal-directed navigation in partially-mapped environments by using non-locally available information to predict the goodness of temporally-extended actions that enter unseen space. Making predictions about…
Mobile robots rely on maps to navigate through an environment. In the absence of any map, the robots must build the map online from partial observations as they move in the environment. Traditional methods build a map using only direct…
We present a novel high-level planning framework that leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to improve autonomous navigation in unknown indoor environments with many dead ends. Traditional exploration methods often take inefficient routes…
We exploit the complementary strengths of vision and proprioception to develop a point-goal navigation system for legged robots, called VP-Nav. Legged systems are capable of traversing more complex terrain than wheeled robots, but to fully…
Safe and high-speed navigation is a key enabling capability for real world deployment of robotic systems. A significant limitation of existing approaches is the computational bottleneck associated with explicit mapping and the limited field…
We present a robot navigation system that uses an imitation learning framework to successfully navigate in complex environments. Our framework takes a pre-built 3D scan of a real environment and trains an agent from pre-generated expert…
We propose a robotic learning system for autonomous exploration and navigation in unexplored environments. We are motivated by the idea that even an unseen environment may be familiar from previous experiences in similar environments. The…
Multimodal intelligence development recently show strong progress in visual understanding and high level reasoning. Though, most reasoning system still reply on textual information as the main medium for inference. This limit their…
Visual Teach-and-Repeat Navigation is a direct solution for mobile robot to be deployed in unknown environments. However, robust trajectory repeat navigation still remains challenged due to environmental changing and dynamic objects. In…
We consider the task of underwater robot navigation for the purpose of collecting scientifically relevant video data for environmental monitoring. The majority of field robots that currently perform monitoring tasks in unstructured natural…
What is a good visual representation for autonomous agents? We address this question in the context of semantic visual navigation, which is the problem of a robot finding its way through a complex environment to a target object, e.g. go to…
Autonomous navigation based on precise localization has been widely developed in both academic research and practical applications. The high demand for localization accuracy has been essential for safe robot planing and navigation while it…
We present Visual Navigation and Locomotion over obstacles (ViNL), which enables a quadrupedal robot to navigate unseen apartments while stepping over small obstacles that lie in its path (e.g., shoes, toys, cables), similar to how humans…
Robot navigation traditionally relies on building an explicit map that is used to plan collision-free trajectories to a desired target. In deformable, complex terrain, using geometric-based approaches can fail to find a path due to…
Path planning in unknown environments is a crucial yet inherently challenging capability for mobile robots, which primarily encompasses two coupled tasks: autonomous exploration and point-goal navigation. In both cases, the robot must…