VANDERER: Map-Free Exploration using Future-Aware and Visual-Curiosity-Guided Diffusion Policy

Mobile agents require efficient exploration strategies to map unseen environments and autonomously plan tasks. Traditional methods rely on generating occupancy maps and optimizing the sequence in which unexplored regions are visited. However, in sensor-constrained settings, such as those limited to monocular cameras, generating accurate occupancy maps is challenging. To address this, we propose VANDERER, an exploration framework that leverages a Visual Curiosity Module (VCM) to guide pre-trained diffusion policies using only monocular image data. This curiosity module predicts the outcomes of proposed actions via a navigation world model and evaluates them through a curiosity cost. The cost then guides the diffusion process toward generating actions that maximize exploration. Evaluated across diverse simulated environments, VANDERER consistently outperforms established baselines, exploring an average of 13.4% more area than NoMaD. Our results reveal a direct correlation between visual and geometric curiosity in outdoor environments, demonstrating that VANDERER can effectively leverage this relationship for efficient exploration using sensor-constrained agents.

OrionNav: Online Planning for Robot Autonomy with Context-Aware LLM and Open-Vocabulary Semantic Scene Graphs

Enabling robots to autonomously navigate unknown, complex, dynamic environments and perform diverse tasks remains a fundamental challenge in developing robust autonomous physical agents. They must effectively perceive their surroundings while leveraging world knowledge for decision-making. While recent approaches utilize vision-language and large language models for scene understanding and planning, they often rely on offline processing, external computing, or restrictive environmental assumptions. We present a novel framework for efficient and scalable real-time, onboard autonomous navigation that integrates multi-level abstraction in both perception and planning in unknown large-scale environments that change over time. Our system fuses data from multiple onboard sensors for localization and mapping and integrates it with open-vocabulary semantics to generate hierarchical scene graphs. An LLM-based planner leverages these graphs to generate high-level task execution strategies, which guide low-level controllers in safely accomplishing goals. Our framework's real-time operation enables continuous updates to scene graphs and plans, allowing swift responses to environmental changes and on-the-fly error correction. This is a key advantage over static or rule-based planning systems. We demonstrate our system's efficacy on a quadruped robot navigating large-scale, dynamic environments, showcasing its adaptability and robustness in diverse scenarios.

MultiTalk: Introspective and Extrospective Dialogue for Human-Environment-LLM Alignment

LLMs have shown promising results in task planning due to their strong natural language understanding and reasoning capabilities. However, issues such as hallucinations, ambiguities in human instructions, environmental constraints, and limitations in the executing agent's capabilities often lead to flawed or incomplete plans. This paper proposes MultiTalk, an LLM-based task planning methodology that addresses these issues through a framework of introspective and extrospective dialogue loops. This approach helps ground generated plans in the context of the environment and the agent's capabilities, while also resolving uncertainties and ambiguities in the given task. These loops are enabled by specialized systems designed to extract and predict task-specific states, and flag mismatches or misalignments among the human user, the LLM agent, and the environment. Effective feedback pathways between these systems and the LLM planner foster meaningful dialogue. The efficacy of this methodology is demonstrated through its application to robotic manipulation tasks. Experiments and ablations highlight the robustness and reliability of our method, and comparisons with baselines further illustrate the superiority of MultiTalk in task planning for embodied agents.