mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

PlaceNav: Topological Navigation through Place Recognition

arXiv 2309.17260 ↗First posted 29 Sep 2023cs.RO cs.AI cs.LGcited by 11

Not on the map. Why?

Abstract (arXiv)

Recent results suggest that splitting topological navigation into robot-independent and robot-specific components improves navigation performance by enabling the robot-independent part to be trained with data collected by robots of different types. However, the navigation methods' performance is still limited by the scarcity of suitable training data and they suffer from poor computational scaling. In this work, we present PlaceNav, subdividing the robot-independent part into navigation-specific and generic computer vision components. We utilize visual place recognition for the subgoal selection of the topological navigation pipeline. This makes subgoal selection more efficient and enables leveraging large-scale datasets from non-robotics sources, increasing training data availability. Bayesian filtering, enabled by place recognition, further improves navigation performance by increasing the temporal consistency of subgoals. Our experimental results verify the design and the new method obtains a 76% higher success rate in indoor and 23% higher in outdoor navigation tasks with higher computational efficiency.

Key facts. Cited by 11 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 30 of its 51 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2023.

Builds on

30 of 51 references.

References · 30

  1. 2019EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networkscited by 6,442
  2. 2017Billion-scale similarity search with GPUscited by 2,497
  3. 2015NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognitioncited by 941
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18 more
  1. 2022Rethinking Visual Geo-localization for Large-Scale Applicationscited by 163
  2. 2019Meta-Sim: Learning to Generate Synthetic Datasetscited by 128
  3. 2021Rapid Exploration for Open-World Navigation with Latent Goal Modelscited by 121
  4. 2018Episodic Curiosity through Reachabilitycited by 109
  5. 2017Deep Learning Features at Scale for Visual Place Recognitioncited by 96
  6. 2022Deep Visual Geo-localization Benchmarkcited by 84
  7. 2020ViNG: Learning Open-World Navigation with Visual Goalscited by 80
  8. 2021Memory-Augmented Reinforcement Learning for Image-Goal Navigationcited by 66
  9. 2023SACSoN: Scalable Autonomous Control for Social Navigationcited by 61
  10. 2021SeqNet: Learning Descriptors for Sequence-based Hierarchical Place Recognitioncited by 57
  11. 2019Deep Visual MPC-Policy Learning for Navigationcited by 56
  12. 2022TartanDrive: A Large-Scale Dataset for Learning Off-Road Dynamics Modelscited by 49
  13. 2017X-View: Graph-Based Semantic Multi-View Localizationcited by 43
  14. 2019Scaling Local Control to Large-Scale Topological Navigationcited by 37
  15. 2022Last-Mile Embodied Visual Navigationcited by 25
  16. 2021Probabilistic Visual Place Recognition for Hierarchical Localizationcited by 20
  17. 2017Addressing Challenging Place Recognition Tasks using Generative Adversarial Networkscited by 9
  18. 2021Probabilistic Appearance-Invariant Topometric Localization with New Place Awarenesscited by 6

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 5; 2025: 5; 2026: 1.

11 papers.

  1. 2024General Place Recognition Survey: Towards Real-World Autonomycited by 23
  2. 2024MeshVPR: Citywide Visual Place Recognition Using 3D Meshescited by 8
  3. 2024TopoNav: Topological Navigation for Efficient Exploration in Sparse Reward Environmentscited by 5
  4. 2025Weakly-supervised VLM-guided Partial Contrastive Learning for Visual Language Navigationcited by 4
  5. 2025GuideNav: User-Informed Development of a Vision-Only Robotic Navigation Assistant For Blind Travelerscited by 4
  6. 2024VLAD-BuFF: Burst-aware Fast Feature Aggregation for Visual Place Recognitioncited by 3
  7. 2024Collaborative Visual Place Recognition through Federated Learningcited by 2
  8. 2025Synthetic vs. Real Training Data for Visual Navigationcited by 1
  9. 2025Multi-Representation Geometric Hierarchy Fusion: An Implicit-Submap Driven Framework for Resilient 3D Place Recognitioncited by 0
  10. 2025TOPO-Bench: An Open-Source Topological Mapping Evaluation Framework with Quantifiable Perceptual Aliasingcited by 0
  11. 2026MAG-VLAQ: Multi-modal Aerial-Ground Query Aggregation for Cross-View Place Recognitioncited by 0