# CATNAV: Cached Vision-Language Traversability for Efficient Zero-Shot Robot Navigation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.22800 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.22800/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Mar 2026.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Which Terrain Is Better? Preference Learning with VLM Prototypes for Off-Road Traversability Ranking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.23673/) (2026)
- [From Language Priors to Field Adaptation: Preference Learning for Traversability Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.02974/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Navigating unstructured environments requires assessing traversal risk relative to a robot's physical capabilities, a challenge that varies across embodiments. We present CATNAV, a cost-aware traversability navigation framework that leverages multimodal LLMs for zero-shot, embodiment-aware costmap generation without task-specific training. We introduce a visuosemantic caching mechanism that detects scene novelty and reuses prior risk assessments for semantically similar frames, reducing online VLM queries by 85.7%. Furthermore, we introduce a VLM-based trajectory selection module that evaluates proposals through visual reasoning to choose the safest path given behavioral constraints. We evaluate CATNAV on a quadruped robot across indoor and outdoor unstructured environments, comparing against state-of-the-art vision-language-action baselines. Across five navigation tasks, CATNAV achieves 10 percentage point higher average goal-reaching rate and 33% fewer behavioral constraint violations.