Integrating Deep RL and Bayesian Inference for ObjectNav in Mobile Robotics

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Castelo-Branco, João, Santos-Victor, José, Bernardino, Alexandre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Castelo-Branco, João
Santos-Victor, José
Bernardino, Alexandre
author_facet Castelo-Branco, João
Santos-Victor, José
Bernardino, Alexandre
contents Autonomous object search is challenging for mobile robots operating in indoor environments due to partial observability, perceptual uncertainty, and the need to trade off exploration and navigation efficiency. Classical probabilistic approaches explicitly represent uncertainty but typically rely on handcrafted action-selection heuristics, while deep reinforcement learning enables adaptive policies but often suffers from slow convergence and limited interpretability. This paper proposes a hybrid object-search framework that integrates Bayesian inference with deep reinforcement learning. The method maintains a spatial belief map over target locations, updated online through Bayesian inference from calibrated object detections, and trains a reinforcement learning policy to select navigation actions directly from this probabilistic representation. The approach is evaluated in realistic indoor simulation using Habitat 3.0 and compared against developed baseline strategies. Across two indoor environments, the proposed method improves success rate while reducing search effort. Overall, the results support the value of combining Bayesian belief estimation with learned action selection to achieve more efficient and reliable objectsearch behavior under partial observability.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_25366
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Integrating Deep RL and Bayesian Inference for ObjectNav in Mobile Robotics
Castelo-Branco, João
Santos-Victor, José
Bernardino, Alexandre
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Autonomous object search is challenging for mobile robots operating in indoor environments due to partial observability, perceptual uncertainty, and the need to trade off exploration and navigation efficiency. Classical probabilistic approaches explicitly represent uncertainty but typically rely on handcrafted action-selection heuristics, while deep reinforcement learning enables adaptive policies but often suffers from slow convergence and limited interpretability. This paper proposes a hybrid object-search framework that integrates Bayesian inference with deep reinforcement learning. The method maintains a spatial belief map over target locations, updated online through Bayesian inference from calibrated object detections, and trains a reinforcement learning policy to select navigation actions directly from this probabilistic representation. The approach is evaluated in realistic indoor simulation using Habitat 3.0 and compared against developed baseline strategies. Across two indoor environments, the proposed method improves success rate while reducing search effort. Overall, the results support the value of combining Bayesian belief estimation with learned action selection to achieve more efficient and reliable objectsearch behavior under partial observability.
title Integrating Deep RL and Bayesian Inference for ObjectNav in Mobile Robotics
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25366