World Models for Autonomous Navigation of Terrestrial Robots from LIDAR Observations

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Steinmetz, Raul, Rosa, Fabio Demo, Kich, Victor Augusto, Bottega, Jair Augusto, Grando, Ricardo Bedin, Gamarra, Daniel Fernando Tello
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Steinmetz, Raul
Rosa, Fabio Demo
Kich, Victor Augusto
Bottega, Jair Augusto
Grando, Ricardo Bedin
Gamarra, Daniel Fernando Tello
author_facet Steinmetz, Raul
Rosa, Fabio Demo
Kich, Victor Augusto
Bottega, Jair Augusto
Grando, Ricardo Bedin
Gamarra, Daniel Fernando Tello
contents Autonomous navigation of terrestrial robots using Reinforcement Learning (RL) from LIDAR observations remains challenging due to the high dimensionality of sensor data and the sample inefficiency of model-free approaches. Conventional policy networks struggle to process full-resolution LIDAR inputs, forcing prior works to rely on simplified observations that reduce spatial awareness and navigation robustness. This paper presents a novel model-based RL framework built on top of the DreamerV3 algorithm, integrating a Multi-Layer Perceptron Variational Autoencoder (MLP-VAE) within a world model to encode high-dimensional LIDAR readings into compact latent representations. These latent features, combined with a learned dynamics predictor, enable efficient imagination-based policy optimization. Experiments on simulated TurtleBot3 navigation tasks demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves faster convergence and higher success rate compared to model-free baselines such as SAC, DDPG, and TD3. It is worth emphasizing that the DreamerV3-based agent attains a 100% success rate across all evaluated environments when using the full dataset of the Turtlebot3 LIDAR (360 readings), while model-free methods plateaued below 85%. These findings demonstrate that integrating predictive world models with learned latent representations enables more efficient and robust navigation from high-dimensional sensory data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_03429
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle World Models for Autonomous Navigation of Terrestrial Robots from LIDAR Observations
Steinmetz, Raul
Rosa, Fabio Demo
Kich, Victor Augusto
Bottega, Jair Augusto
Grando, Ricardo Bedin
Gamarra, Daniel Fernando Tello
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Autonomous navigation of terrestrial robots using Reinforcement Learning (RL) from LIDAR observations remains challenging due to the high dimensionality of sensor data and the sample inefficiency of model-free approaches. Conventional policy networks struggle to process full-resolution LIDAR inputs, forcing prior works to rely on simplified observations that reduce spatial awareness and navigation robustness. This paper presents a novel model-based RL framework built on top of the DreamerV3 algorithm, integrating a Multi-Layer Perceptron Variational Autoencoder (MLP-VAE) within a world model to encode high-dimensional LIDAR readings into compact latent representations. These latent features, combined with a learned dynamics predictor, enable efficient imagination-based policy optimization. Experiments on simulated TurtleBot3 navigation tasks demonstrate that the proposed architecture achieves faster convergence and higher success rate compared to model-free baselines such as SAC, DDPG, and TD3. It is worth emphasizing that the DreamerV3-based agent attains a 100% success rate across all evaluated environments when using the full dataset of the Turtlebot3 LIDAR (360 readings), while model-free methods plateaued below 85%. These findings demonstrate that integrating predictive world models with learned latent representations enables more efficient and robust navigation from high-dimensional sensory data.
title World Models for Autonomous Navigation of Terrestrial Robots from LIDAR Observations
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.03429