# TANGO: Humanoid Navigation in Cluttered Environments with a Whole-Body Vision-Language-Action Model

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09158 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.09158/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Qwen2.5-VL Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13923/) (2025)
- [Scaling Rectified Flow Transformers for High-Resolution Image Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03206/) (2024)
- [Gemini 2.5: Pushing the Frontier with Advanced Reasoning, Multimodality, Long Context, and Next Generation Agentic Capabilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06261/) (2025)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [Vision-and-Language Navigation: Interpreting visually-grounded navigation instructions in real environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07280/) (2017)
- [Beyond the Nav-Graph: Vision-and-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02857/) (2020)
- [LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04429/) (2022)
- [LongVU: Spatiotemporal Adaptive Compression for Long Video-Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.17434/) (2024)
- [NavGPT: Explicit Reasoning in Vision-and-Language Navigation with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16986/) (2023)
- [NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15852/) (2024)
- [ViNT: A Foundation Model for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14846/) (2023)
- [NaVILA: Legged Robot Vision-Language-Action Model for Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04453/) (2024)
- [HumanPlus: Humanoid Shadowing and Imitation from Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10454/) (2024)
- [BeyondMimic: From Motion Tracking to Versatile Humanoid Control via Guided Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08241/) (2025)
- [Learning Human-to-Humanoid Real-Time Whole-Body Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04436/) (2024)
- [TWIST: Teleoperated Whole-Body Imitation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02833/) (2025)
- [SONIC: Supersizing Motion Tracking for Natural Humanoid Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07820/) (2025)
- [NavGPT-2: Unleashing Navigational Reasoning Capability for Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12366/) (2024)
- [Humanoid Parkour Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10759/) (2024)
- [Embodied Navigation Foundation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12129/) (2025)
- [Visual Imitation Enables Contextual Humanoid Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03729/) (2025)
- [Lookahead Exploration with Neural Radiance Representation for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01943/) (2024)
- [Training-Time Action Conditioning for Efficient Real-Time Chunking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.05964/) (2025)
- [Ground Slow, Move Fast: A Dual-System Foundation Model for Generalizable Vision-and-Language Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08186/) (2025)
- [Humanoid Locomotion and Manipulation: Current Progress and Challenges in Control, Planning, and Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.02116/) (2025)
- [AMO: Adaptive Motion Optimization for Hyper-Dexterous Humanoid Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03738/) (2025)
- [TrackVLA: Embodied Visual Tracking in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23189/) (2025)
- [Humanoid-VLA: Towards Universal Humanoid Control with Visual Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14795/) (2025)
- [TWIST2: Scalable, Portable, and Holistic Humanoid Data Collection System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02832/) (2025)
- [LeVERB: Humanoid Whole-Body Control with Latent Vision-Language Instruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13751/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Training Generalist Navigation Policies via Action Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17593/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study the problem of navigating cluttered indoor environments with a humanoid robot. Unlike conventional methods that model navigation as a 2D path planning problem, humanoid traversal in cluttered environments requires continuous geometry-aware whole-body adaptation, including coordinated arm placement, torso adjustment, and gait modulation for collision-free movement through complex 3D spaces. We introduce TANGO, the first whole-body vision-language navigation framework for language-conditioned humanoid traversal in cluttered environments. Given a natural-language instruction and egocentric RGB observations, TANGO directly predicts 29-DoF joint-space actions for downstream whole-body control. We train TANGO entirely in simulation by synthesizing diverse collision-free traversal behaviors via global path planning, kinematic whole-body motion generation, obstacle-aware motion editing, and RL-based tracking. This pipeline provides dynamically feasible action supervision for learning language-conditioned whole-body policies. In extensive simulation experiments, TANGO demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in vision-language navigation, while outperforming strong modular baselines in navigating challenging scenes requiring obstacle negotiation. Lastly, we deploy TANGO zero-shot on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot, and observe robust language-guided traversal in cluttered real-world scenes without training on any real-world navigation data.