# Learning to Navigate Sidewalks in Outdoor Environments

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.05603 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.05603/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics: A Survey of Real-World Successes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03539/) (2024)
- [VRL3: A Data-Driven Framework for Visual Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10324/) (2022)
- [Learning Robust Autonomous Navigation and Locomotion for Wheeled-Legged Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01792/) (2024)
- [Neural Volumetric Memory for Visual Locomotion Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.01201/) (2023)
- [CityWalker: Learning Embodied Urban Navigation from Web-Scale Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.17820/) (2024)
- [ViNL: Visual Navigation and Locomotion Over Obstacles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.14791/) (2022)
- [Towards Autonomous Micromobility through Scalable Urban Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00690/) (2025)
- [Learning to Walk by Steering: Perceptive Quadrupedal Locomotion in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.09233/) (2022)
- [Visual-Policy Learning through Multi-Camera View to Single-Camera View Knowledge Distillation for Robot Manipulation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07026/) (2023)
- [Transforming a Quadruped into a Guide Robot for the Visually Impaired: Formalizing Wayfinding, Interaction Modeling, and Safety Mechanism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14055/) (2023)
- [AcL: Action Learner for Fault-Tolerant Quadruped Locomotion Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.21401/) (2025)
- [Wanderland: Geometrically Grounded Simulation for Open-World Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20620/) (2025)
- [Distilling Privileged Information for Dubins Traveling Salesman Problems with Neighborhoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16721/) (2024)
- [Robot Squid Game: Quadrupedal Locomotion for Traversing Narrow Tunnels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13665/) (2026)
- [MulDP: Multimodal Diffusion Policy for Autonomous Quadruped Parkour Navigation across Complex Terrains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03984/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Outdoor navigation on sidewalks in urban environments is the key technology behind important human assistive applications, such as last-mile delivery or neighborhood patrol. This paper aims to develop a quadruped robot that follows a route plan generated by public map services, while remaining on sidewalks and avoiding collisions with obstacles and pedestrians. We devise a two-staged learning framework, which first trains a teacher agent in an abstract world with privileged ground-truth information, and then applies Behavior Cloning to teach the skills to a student agent who only has access to realistic sensors. The main research effort of this paper focuses on overcoming challenges when deploying the student policy on a quadruped robot in the real world. We propose methodologies for designing sensing modalities, network architectures, and training procedures to enable zero-shot policy transfer to unstructured and dynamic real outdoor environments. We evaluate our learning framework on a quadrupedal robot navigating sidewalks in the city of Atlanta, USA. Using the learned navigation policy and its onboard sensors, the robot is able to walk 3.2 kilometers with a limited number of human interventions.