Path-conditioned Reinforcement Learning-based Local Planning for Long-Range Navigation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Haro, Mateo, Richter, Julia, Yang, Fan, Cadena, Cesar, Hutter, Marco
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Haro, Mateo
Richter, Julia
Yang, Fan
Cadena, Cesar
Hutter, Marco
author_facet Haro, Mateo
Richter, Julia
Yang, Fan
Cadena, Cesar
Hutter, Marco
contents Long-range navigation is commonly addressed through hierarchical pipelines in which a global planner generates a path, decomposed into waypoints, and followed sequentially by a local planner. These systems are sensitive to global path quality, as inaccurate remote sensing data can result in locally infeasible waypoints, which degrade local execution. At the same time, the limited global context available to the local planner hinders long-range efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a reinforcement learning-based local navigation policy that leverages path information as contextual guidance. The policy is conditioned on reference path observations and trained with a reward function mainly based on goal-reaching objectives, without any explicit path-following reward. Through this implicit conditioning, the policy learns to opportunistically exploit path information while remaining robust to misleading or degraded guidance. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves navigation efficiency when high-quality paths are available and maintains baseline-level performance when path observations are severely degraded or even non-existent. These properties make the method particularly well-suited for long-range navigation scenarios in which high-level plans are approximate and local execution must remain adaptive to uncertainty.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_13888
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Path-conditioned Reinforcement Learning-based Local Planning for Long-Range Navigation
Haro, Mateo
Richter, Julia
Yang, Fan
Cadena, Cesar
Hutter, Marco
Robotics
Long-range navigation is commonly addressed through hierarchical pipelines in which a global planner generates a path, decomposed into waypoints, and followed sequentially by a local planner. These systems are sensitive to global path quality, as inaccurate remote sensing data can result in locally infeasible waypoints, which degrade local execution. At the same time, the limited global context available to the local planner hinders long-range efficiency. To address this issue, we propose a reinforcement learning-based local navigation policy that leverages path information as contextual guidance. The policy is conditioned on reference path observations and trained with a reward function mainly based on goal-reaching objectives, without any explicit path-following reward. Through this implicit conditioning, the policy learns to opportunistically exploit path information while remaining robust to misleading or degraded guidance. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly improves navigation efficiency when high-quality paths are available and maintains baseline-level performance when path observations are severely degraded or even non-existent. These properties make the method particularly well-suited for long-range navigation scenarios in which high-level plans are approximate and local execution must remain adaptive to uncertainty.
title Path-conditioned Reinforcement Learning-based Local Planning for Long-Range Navigation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.13888