Robostral Navigate
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Abstract (arXiv)
Deploying navigation systems at scale requires a recipe that minimizes sensor assumptions, generalizes across robot embodiments, and trains efficiently. Yet, today's best systems depend on depth sensors, multi-camera rigs, or pre-built maps, limiting the hardware they support and increasing deployment cost. We introduce Robostral Navigate, an 8B vision-language model built around this scalability objective. The model consumes only a stream of monocular RGB images - the most ubiquitous sensor across robotic platforms and predicts waypoints by pointing to the next target location in the current camera view. Operating purely in image space, rather than robot-specific coordinates, makes the policy naturally robust to changes in camera intrinsics and scene scale, enabling deployment across wheeled, legged, and aerial robots without recalibration. We generate 2.4 million trajectories across 350k simulated scenes to reduce the reliance on real-world data collection and scale easily. We further introduce a prefix-caching training recipe that packs entire episodes into single training sequences, reducing training tokens by 22x and cutting training time from months to days. A tree-based attention mask prevents conditioning on previous ground-truth actions, encouraging visually grounded action prediction, and reinforcement learning is used to further improve exploration and recovery capabilities. On the Room-to-Room and Room-Across-Room in Continuous Environments (R2R-CE and RxR-CE) benchmarks, Robostral Navigate sets a new state of the art. On R2R-CE, it achieves a 77.4% success rate, surpassing the best monocular method by 10.5 points and the strongest depth- or multi-camera system by 5.3 points despite using only a single RGB camera. On RxR-CE, it reaches 75.1% success rate, outperforming all monocular baselines.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 23 of its 25 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Jul 2026.
Builds on
23 of 25 references.
References · 23
- 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 5,931
- 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 2,993
- 2019Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Researchcited by 1,163
- 2021Habitat-Matterport 3D Dataset (HM3D): 1000 Large-scale 3D Environments for Embodied AIcited by 579
- 2015Sequence Level Training with Recurrent Neural Networkscited by 568
- 2021Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitatcited by 501
- 2022LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Actioncited by 435
- 2020Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 429
- 2020Room-Across-Room: Multilingual Vision-and-Language Navigation with Dense Spatiotemporal Groundingcited by 401
- 2025MiniMax-M1: Scaling Test-Time Compute Efficiently with Lightning Attentioncited by 248
- 2024NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 222
- 2024NaVILA: Legged Robot Vision-Language-Action Model for Navigationcited by 201
11 more
- 2023ETPNav: Evolving Topological Planning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 165
- 2024Uni-NaVid: A Video-based Vision-Language-Action Model for Unifying Embodied Navigation Taskscited by 146
- 2026Molmo2: Open Weights and Data for Vision-Language Models with Video Understanding and Groundingcited by 132
- 2021Waypoint Models for Instruction-guided Navigation in Continuous Environmentscited by 125
- 2025StreamVLN: Streaming Vision-and-Language Navigation via SlowFast Context Modelingcited by 107
- 2025Embodied Navigation Foundation Modelcited by 65
- 2025Ground Slow, Move Fast: A Dual-System Foundation Model for Generalizable Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 56
- 2026Qwen-VLA: Unifying Vision-Language-Action Modeling across Tasks, Environments, and Robot Embodimentscited by 42
- 2025OmniNav: A Unified Framework for Prospective Exploration and Visual-Language Navigationcited by 34
- 2026ABot-N0: Technical Report on the VLA Foundation Model for Versatile Embodied Navigationcited by 23
- 2026Qwen-RobotNav Technical Report: A Scalable Navigation Model Designed for an Agentic Navigation Systemcited by 10
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
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- 2026GemNav: Discrete-Token Visual Robot Navigation using a Multimodal Large Language Model
- 2025NaviTrace: Evaluating Embodied Navigation of Vision-Language Models
- 2025FiLM-Nav: Efficient and Generalizable Navigation via VLM Fine-tuning
- 2026RECAST: Recasting Vision-Language Semantics into an Actionable Cost Map for Robot Navigation
- 2019Learning Your Way Without Map or Compass: Panoramic Target Driven Visual Navigation
- 2026Uni-LaViRA: Language-Vision-Robot Actions Translation for Unified Embodied Navigation
- 2026CATNAV: Cached Vision-Language Traversability for Efficient Zero-Shot Robot Navigation
- 2025LaViRA: Language-Vision-Robot Actions Translation for Zero-Shot Vision Language Navigation in Continuous Environments