Vision-Language Navigation with Embodied Intelligence: A Survey

As a long-term vision in the field of artificial intelligence, the core goal of embodied intelligence is to improve the perception, understanding, and interaction capabilities of agents and the environment. Vision-language navigation (VLN), as a critical research path to achieve embodied intelligence, focuses on exploring how agents use natural language to communicate effectively with humans, receive and understand instructions, and ultimately rely on visual information to achieve accurate navigation. VLN integrates artificial intelligence, natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. This field faces technical challenges but shows potential for application such as human-computer interaction. However, due to the complex process involved from language understanding to action execution, VLN faces the problem of aligning visual information and language instructions, improving generalization ability, and many other challenges. This survey systematically reviews the research progress of VLN and details the research direction of VLN with embodied intelligence. After a detailed summary of its system architecture and research based on methods and commonly used benchmark datasets, we comprehensively analyze the problems and challenges faced by current research and explore the future development direction of this field, aiming to provide a practical reference for researchers.