# Splat-Nav: Safe Real-Time Robot Navigation in Gaussian Splatting Maps

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.02751 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02751/

## Key facts

- Cited by 55 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Mar 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 55)

- [Recent Advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11134/) (2024)
- [Large Spatial Model: End-to-end Unposed Images to Semantic 3D](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18956/) (2024)
- [Splat-MOVER: Multi-Stage, Open-Vocabulary Robotic Manipulation via Editable Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.04378/) (2024)
- [ActiveSplat: High-Fidelity Scene Reconstruction through Active Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21955/) (2024)
- [What Is The Best 3D Scene Representation for Robotics? From Geometric to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03422/) (2025)
- [Momentum-GS: Momentum Gaussian Self-Distillation for High-Quality Large Scene Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04887/) (2024)
- [Neural Fields in Robotics: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.20220/) (2024)
- [SOUS VIDE: Cooking Visual Drone Navigation Policies in a Gaussian Splatting Vacuum](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16346/) (2024)
- [HDRSplat: Gaussian Splatting for High Dynamic Range 3D Scene Reconstruction from Raw Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.16503/) (2024)
- [HGSLoc: 3DGS-based Heuristic Camera Pose Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10925/) (2024)
- [AnchorSplat: Feed-Forward 3D Gaussian Splatting with 3D Geometric Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07053/) (2026)
- [SIREN: Semantic, Initialization-Free Registration of Multi-Robot Gaussian Splatting Maps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.06519/) (2025)
- [GRaD-Nav: Efficiently Learning Visual Drone Navigation with Gaussian Radiance Fields and Differentiable Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03984/) (2025)
- [SINGER: An Onboard Generalist Vision-Language Navigation Policy for Drones](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18610/) (2025)
- [ReLaGS: Relational Language Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17605/) (2026)
- [Mode-GS: Monocular Depth Guided Anchored 3D Gaussian Splatting for Robust Ground-View Scene Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04646/) (2024)
- [ReaDy-Go: Real-to-Sim Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting Simulation for Environment-Specific Visual Navigation with Moving Obstacles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11575/) (2026)
- [DCSEG: Decoupled 3D Open-Set Segmentation using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10972/) (2024)
- [AtlasGS: Atlanta-world Guided Surface Reconstruction with Implicit Structured Gaussians](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.25129/) (2025)
- [Wanderland: Geometrically Grounded Simulation for Open-World Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20620/) (2025)
- [Scan, Materialize, Simulate: A Generalizable Framework for Physically Grounded Robot Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.14938/) (2025)
- [Active Next-Best-View Optimization for Risk-Averse Path Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.06481/) (2025)
- [SING3R-SLAM: Submap-based Indoor Monocular Gaussian SLAM with 3D Reconstruction Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.17207/) (2025)
- [UAVTwin: Neural Digital Twins for UAVs using Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.02158/) (2025)
- [Learning human-to-robot handovers through 3D scene reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.08726/) (2025)
- [Camera Pose Refinement via 3D Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.17876/) (2025)
- [CoRe-GS: Coarse-to-Refined Gaussian Splatting with Semantic Object Focus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.04859/) (2025)
- [From Fields to Splats: A Cross-Domain Survey of Real-Time Neural Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23555/) (2025)
- [Geometry Meets Vision: Revisiting Pretrained Semantics in Distilled Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03104/) (2025)
- [SketchPlan: Diffusion Based Drone Planning From Human Sketches](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03545/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Splat-Nav, a real-time robot navigation pipeline for Gaussian Splatting (GSplat) scenes, a powerful new 3D scene representation. Splat-Nav consists of two components: 1) Splat-Plan, a safe planning module, and 2) Splat-Loc, a robust vision-based pose estimation module. Splat-Plan builds a safe-by-construction polytope corridor through the map based on mathematically rigorous collision constraints and then constructs a B'ezier curve trajectory through this corridor. Splat-Loc provides real-time recursive state estimates given only an RGB feed from an on-board camera, leveraging the point-cloud representation inherent in GSplat scenes. Working together, these modules give robots the ability to recursively re-plan smooth and safe trajectories to goal locations. Goals can be specified with position coordinates, or with language commands by using a semantic GSplat. We demonstrate improved safety compared to point cloud-based methods in extensive simulation experiments. In a total of 126 hardware flights, we demonstrate equivalent safety and speed compared to motion capture and visual odometry, but without a manual frame alignment required by those methods. We show online re-planning at more than 2 Hz and pose estimation at about 25 Hz, an order of magnitude faster than Neural Radiance Field (NeRF)-based navigation methods, thereby enabling real-time navigation. We provide experiment videos on our project page at https://chengine.github.io/splatnav/. Our codebase and ROS nodes can be found at https://github.com/chengine/splatnav.