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Robot Navigation Using Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models in Outdoor Environments

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arxiv 2409.20445 v1 pith:TNQDVMIJ submitted 2024-09-30 cs.RO

Robot Navigation Using Physically Grounded Vision-Language Models in Outdoor Environments

classification cs.RO
keywords robotenvironmentsnavigationoutdoorphysicaltraversabilitydiversemodels
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We present a novel autonomous robot navigation algorithm for outdoor environments that is capable of handling diverse terrain traversability conditions. Our approach, VLM-GroNav, uses vision-language models (VLMs) and integrates them with physical grounding that is used to assess intrinsic terrain properties such as deformability and slipperiness. We use proprioceptive-based sensing, which provides direct measurements of these physical properties, and enhances the overall semantic understanding of the terrains. Our formulation uses in-context learning to ground the VLM's semantic understanding with proprioceptive data to allow dynamic updates of traversability estimates based on the robot's real-time physical interactions with the environment. We use the updated traversability estimations to inform both the local and global planners for real-time trajectory replanning. We validate our method on a legged robot (Ghost Vision 60) and a wheeled robot (Clearpath Husky), in diverse real-world outdoor environments with different deformable and slippery terrains. In practice, we observe significant improvements over state-of-the-art methods by up to 50% increase in navigation success rate.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. PathPainter: Transferring the Generalization Ability of Image Generation Models to Embodied Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    PathPainter transfers image generation models to embodied navigation by generating traversability masks from BEV images and language instructions while using cross-view localization to reduce odometry drift.

  2. Visual-Language-Guided Task Planning for Horticultural Robots

    cs.RO 2026-01 conditional novelty 6.0

    A vision-language model drives a simulated greenhouse robot through simple crop-inspection tasks with ~87% success, but long multi-target tasks collapse to under 10% success.

  3. Splatblox: Traversability-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Outdoor Robot Navigation

    cs.RO 2025-11 conditional novelty 6.0

    Splatblox creates a traversability-aware ESDF from RGB-LiDAR fusion via Gaussian Splatting, enabling semantic navigation that outperforms prior methods by over 50% success rate in vegetated field trials on quadruped a...

  4. A Comprehensive Survey and Systematic Real-World Evaluation of Embodied Vision-and-Language Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-07 accept novelty 5.5

    VLN methods show a large sim-to-real gap; a hierarchical system reaches 51% real-world success versus 22% for a monolithic RGB-only system across ten physical scenes.

  5. PathPainter: Transferring the Generalization Ability of Image Generation Models to Embodied Navigation

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Navigation system transfers image generation models to embodied tasks via BEV-based traversability mask generation from language and cross-view localization for odometry correction, shown on a UAV completing 160m outd...