Related papers: Walk With Me: Long-Horizon Social Navigation for H…
In this paper, we present a robotic navigation algorithm with natural language interfaces, which enables a robot to safely walk through a changing environment with moving persons by following human instructions such as "go to the restaurant…
Humans have the remarkable ability to navigate through unfamiliar environments by solely relying on our prior knowledge and descriptions of the environment. For robots to perform the same type of navigation, they need to be able to…
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…
Goal-conditioned policies for robotic navigation can be trained on large, unannotated datasets, providing for good generalization to real-world settings. However, particularly in vision-based settings where specifying goals requires an…
Navigating socially in human environments requires more than satisfying geometric constraints, as collision-free paths may still interfere with ongoing activities or conflict with social norms. Addressing this challenge calls for analyzing…
We discuss the process of building semantic maps, how to interactively label entities in them, and how to use them to enable context-aware navigation behaviors in human environments. We utilize planar surfaces, such as walls and tables, and…
When navigating in a man-made environment they haven't visited before--like an office building--humans employ behaviors such as reading signs and asking others for directions. These behaviors help humans reach their destinations efficiently…
Hand-drawn maps can be used to convey navigation instructions between humans and robots in a natural and efficient manner. However, these maps can often contain inaccuracies such as scale distortions and missing landmarks which present…
Humans have a natural ability to perform semantic associations with the surrounding objects in the environment. This allows them to create a mental map of the environment, allowing them to navigate on-demand when given linguistic…
Ensuring accessible pedestrian navigation requires reasoning about both semantic and spatial aspects of complex urban scenes, a challenge that existing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) struggle to meet. Although these models can…
Visual navigation in unknown environments based solely on natural language descriptions is a key capability for intelligent robots. In this work, we propose a navigation framework built upon off-the-shelf Visual Language Models (VLMs),…
The world is filled with a wide variety of objects. For robots to be useful, they need the ability to find arbitrary objects described by people. In this paper, we present LeLaN(Learning Language-conditioned Navigation policy), a novel…
Robots should exist anywhere humans do: indoors, outdoors, and even unmapped environments. In contrast, the focus of recent advancements in Object Goal Navigation(OGN) has targeted navigating in indoor environments by leveraging spatial and…
Grounding language to the visual observations of a navigating agent can be performed using off-the-shelf visual-language models pretrained on Internet-scale data (e.g., image captions). While this is useful for matching images to natural…
Navigating towards fully open language goals and exploring open scenes in an intelligent way have always raised significant challenges. Recently, Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to reason with both…
Robots require a semantic understanding of their surroundings to operate in an efficient and explainable way in human environments. In the literature, there has been an extensive focus on object labeling and exhaustive scene graph…
Robots operating in human-shared environments must not only achieve task-level navigation objectives such as safety and efficiency, but also adapt their behavior to human preferences. However, as human preferences are typically expressed in…
Autonomous navigation guided by natural language instructions is essential for improving human-robot interaction and enabling complex operations in dynamic environments. While large language models (LLMs) are not inherently designed for…
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has been studied mainly in either discrete or continuous settings, with little attention to dynamic, crowded environments. We present HA-VLN 2.0, a unified benchmark introducing explicit social-awareness…
For robotic vehicles to navigate safely and efficiently in pedestrian-rich environments, it is important to model subtle human behaviors and navigation rules (e.g., passing on the right). However, while instinctive to humans, socially…