Long Range Navigator (LRN): Extending robot planning horizons beyond metric maps

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Schmittle, Matt, Baijal, Rohan, Hatch, Nathan, Scalise, Rosario, Castro, Mateo Guaman, Talia, Sidharth, Khetarpal, Khimya, Boots, Byron, Srinivasa, Siddhartha
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Schmittle, Matt
Baijal, Rohan
Hatch, Nathan
Scalise, Rosario
Castro, Mateo Guaman
Talia, Sidharth
Khetarpal, Khimya
Boots, Byron
Srinivasa, Siddhartha
author_facet Schmittle, Matt
Baijal, Rohan
Hatch, Nathan
Scalise, Rosario
Castro, Mateo Guaman
Talia, Sidharth
Khetarpal, Khimya
Boots, Byron
Srinivasa, Siddhartha
contents A robot navigating an outdoor environment with no prior knowledge of the space must rely on its local sensing to perceive its surroundings and plan. This can come in the form of a local metric map or local policy with some fixed horizon. Beyond that, there is a fog of unknown space marked with some fixed cost. A limited planning horizon can often result in myopic decisions leading the robot off course or worse, into very difficult terrain. Ideally, we would like the robot to have full knowledge that can be orders of magnitude larger than a local cost map. In practice, this is intractable due to sparse sensing information and often computationally expensive. In this work, we make a key observation that long-range navigation only necessitates identifying good frontier directions for planning instead of full map knowledge. To this end, we propose Long Range Navigator (LRN), that learns an intermediate affordance representation mapping high-dimensional camera images to `affordable' frontiers for planning, and then optimizing for maximum alignment with the desired goal. LRN notably is trained entirely on unlabeled ego-centric videos making it easy to scale and adapt to new platforms. Through extensive off-road experiments on Spot and a Big Vehicle, we find that augmenting existing navigation stacks with LRN reduces human interventions at test-time and leads to faster decision making indicating the relevance of LRN. https://personalrobotics.github.io/lrn
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_13149
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Long Range Navigator (LRN): Extending robot planning horizons beyond metric maps
Schmittle, Matt
Baijal, Rohan
Hatch, Nathan
Scalise, Rosario
Castro, Mateo Guaman
Talia, Sidharth
Khetarpal, Khimya
Boots, Byron
Srinivasa, Siddhartha
Robotics
A robot navigating an outdoor environment with no prior knowledge of the space must rely on its local sensing to perceive its surroundings and plan. This can come in the form of a local metric map or local policy with some fixed horizon. Beyond that, there is a fog of unknown space marked with some fixed cost. A limited planning horizon can often result in myopic decisions leading the robot off course or worse, into very difficult terrain. Ideally, we would like the robot to have full knowledge that can be orders of magnitude larger than a local cost map. In practice, this is intractable due to sparse sensing information and often computationally expensive. In this work, we make a key observation that long-range navigation only necessitates identifying good frontier directions for planning instead of full map knowledge. To this end, we propose Long Range Navigator (LRN), that learns an intermediate affordance representation mapping high-dimensional camera images to `affordable' frontiers for planning, and then optimizing for maximum alignment with the desired goal. LRN notably is trained entirely on unlabeled ego-centric videos making it easy to scale and adapt to new platforms. Through extensive off-road experiments on Spot and a Big Vehicle, we find that augmenting existing navigation stacks with LRN reduces human interventions at test-time and leads to faster decision making indicating the relevance of LRN. https://personalrobotics.github.io/lrn
title Long Range Navigator (LRN): Extending robot planning horizons beyond metric maps
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.13149