Title: Embodied Navigation Foundation Model
Primary area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning
Keywords: Embodied Navigation, Vision-Language-Action Model

Abstract: Navigation is a fundamental capability in embodied AI, representing the intelligence required to perceive and interact within physical environments. To achieve such intelligence, recent advanced works leverage Vision-Language Models (VLMs), which demonstrate strong generalizability and possess a well-suited formulation for navigation. However, these approaches remain largely confined to narrow task settings and embodiment-specific architectures. In this work, we introduce a cross-embodiment and cross-task Navigation Foundation Model (NavFoM), trained on eight million navigation samples that encompass quadrupeds, drones, wheeled robots, and vehicles, and spanning diverse tasks such as vision-and-language navigation, object searching, target tracking, and autonomous driving. NavFoM employs a unified architecture that processes multimodal navigation inputs from varying camera configurations and navigation horizons. To accommodate diverse camera setups and temporal horizons, NavFoM incorporates identifier tokens that embed camera view information of embodiments and the temporal context of tasks.  Furthermore, to meet the demands of real-world deployment, NavFoM controls all observation tokens using a dynamically adjusted sampling strategy under a limited token length budget. Extensive evaluations on seven public benchmarks demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art or highly competitive performance across different navigation tasks and embodiments without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. Additional real-world experiments further confirm the strong generalizability and practical applicability of our approach.

TL;DR: We propose a cross-task and cross-embodiment navigation foundation model.