# BEVNav: Robot Autonomous Navigation Via Spatial-Temporal Contrastive Learning in Bird's-Eye View

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.01646 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01646/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in RL for robot navigation and UAV control, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods.
- Builds on 27 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Sep 2024.

## Placed in

- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [RL for robot navigation and UAV control](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/rl-for-robot-navigation-and-uav-control/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Trust Region Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05477/) (2015)
- [Asynchronous Methods for Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01783/) (2016)
- [PointPillars: Fast Encoders for Object Detection from Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05784/) (2018)
- [BEVFormer: Learning Bird's-Eye-View Representation from Multi-Camera Images via Spatiotemporal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.17270/) (2022)
- [BEVFusion: Multi-Task Multi-Sensor Fusion with Unified Bird's-Eye View Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13542/) (2022)
- [CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04136/) (2020)
- [Perceiver-Actor: A Multi-Task Transformer for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05451/) (2022)
- [DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00357/) (2019)
- [Contact-GraspNet: Efficient 6-DoF Grasp Generation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14127/) (2021)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Q-attention: Efficient Learning for Visual Robotic Manipulation via Discretisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12534/) (2021)
- [Instruction-driven history-aware policies for robotic manipulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04899/) (2022)
- [Multi-View Masked World Models for Visual Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02408/) (2023)
- [Bird's-Eye-View Scene Graph for Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04758/) (2023)
- [DRL-VO: Learning to Navigate Through Crowded Dynamic Scenes Using Velocity Obstacles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06512/) (2023)
- [Goal-Driven Autonomous Exploration Through Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.07119/) (2021)
- [Is Mapping Necessary for Realistic PointGoal Navigation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00997/) (2022)
- [Reinforcement Learned Distributed Multi-Robot Navigation with Reciprocal Velocity Obstacle Shaped Rewards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10229/) (2022)
- [Bi-Mapper: Holistic BEV Semantic Mapping for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04205/) (2023)
- [On the Efficacy of 3D Point Cloud Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06799/) (2023)
- [Depth-CUPRL: Depth-Imaged Contrastive Unsupervised Prioritized Representations in Reinforcement Learning for Mapless Navigation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15211/) (2022)
- [Point Cloud Based Reinforcement Learning for Sim-to-Real and Partial Observability in Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.13715/) (2020)
- [BEVTrack: A Simple and Strong Baseline for 3D Single Object Tracking in Bird's-Eye View](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.02185/) (2023)
- [Interpretable UAV Collision Avoidance using Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.12254/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [ROCKET-2: Steering Visuomotor Policy via Cross-View Goal Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02505/) (2025)
- [Oracle-Guided Masked Contrastive Reinforcement Learning for Visuomotor Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05692/) (2025)
- [ST-Booster: An Iterative SpatioTemporal Perception Booster for Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09843/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Goal-driven mobile robot navigation in map-less environments requires effective state representations for reliable decision-making. Inspired by the favorable properties of Bird's-Eye View (BEV) in point clouds for visual perception, this paper introduces a novel navigation approach named BEVNav. It employs deep reinforcement learning to learn BEV representations and enhance decision-making reliability. First, we propose a self-supervised spatial-temporal contrastive learning approach to learn BEV representations. Spatially, two randomly augmented views from a point cloud predict each other, enhancing spatial features. Temporally, we combine the current observation with consecutive frames' actions to predict future features, establishing the relationship between observation transitions and actions to capture temporal cues. Then, incorporating this spatial-temporal contrastive learning in the Soft Actor-Critic reinforcement learning framework, our BEVNav offers a superior navigation policy. Extensive experiments demonstrate BEVNav's robustness in environments with dense pedestrians, outperforming state-of-the-art methods across multiple benchmarks. revThe code will be made publicly available at https://github.com/LanrenzzzZ/BEVNav.