NaVILA: Legged Robot Vision-Language-Action Model for Navigation

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission295 Authors

13 Sept 2024 (modified: 21 Nov 2024)ICLR 2025 Conference SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: Vision Language Action, Legged Robots, Vision Language Navigation
Abstract: This paper proposes to solve the problem of Vision-and-Language Navigation with legged robots, which not only provides a flexible way for humans to command but also allows the robot to navigate through more challenging and cluttered scenes. However, it is non-trivial to translate human language instructions all the way to low-level leg joint actions. We propose NaVILA, a 2-level framework that unifies a Vision-Language-Action model (VLA) with locomotion skills. Instead of directly predicting low-level actions from VLA, NaVILA first generates mid-level actions with spatial information in the form of language, (e.g., "moving forward 75cm"), which serves as an input for a visual locomotion RL policy for execution. NaVILA substantially improves previous approaches on existing benchmarks. The same advantages are demonstrated in our newly developed benchmarks with IsaacLab, featuring more realistic scenes, low-level controls, and real-world robot experiments.
Supplementary Material: zip
Primary Area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning
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Submission Number: 295
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