EdgeNavMamba: Mamba Optimized Object Detection for Energy Efficient Edge Devices

Deployment of efficient and accurate Deep Learning models has long been a challenge in autonomous navigation, particularly for real-time applications on resource-constrained edge devices. Edge devices are limited in computing power and memory, making model efficiency and compression essential. In this work, we propose EdgeNavMamba, a reinforcement learning-based framework for goal-directed navigation using an efficient Mamba object detection model. To train and evaluate the detector, we introduce a custom shape detection dataset collected in diverse indoor settings, reflecting visual cues common in real-world navigation. The object detector serves as a pre-processing module, extracting bounding boxes (BBOX) from visual input, which are then passed to an RL policy to control goal-oriented navigation. Experimental results show that the student model achieved a reduction of 67% in size, and up to 73% in energy per inference on edge devices of NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano and Raspberry Pi 5, while keeping the same performance as the teacher model. EdgeNavMamba also maintains high detection accuracy in MiniWorld and IsaacLab simulators while reducing parameters by 31% compared to the baseline. In the MiniWorld simulator, the navigation policy achieves over 90% success across environments of varying complexity.