Robostral Navigate
Arjun Majumdar, Avinash Sooriyarachchi, Benjamin Tibi, Chris Bamford, Elliot Chane-Sane, Guillaume Lample, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Ludovic Ho Fuh, Mathieu Poiree, Olivier Duchenne, Rosalie Millner, Srijan Mishra, Theo Cachet, Thomas Chabal
This paper introduces Robostral Navigate, a vision-language model that enables robots to navigate using only a single monocular RGB camera, making it more scalable and cost-effective for deployment across various robotic platforms. Practitioners might care about this because it can simplify navigation tasks for robots in real-world environments.
Abstract
Deploying navigation systems at scale requires a recipe that minimizes sensor assumptions, generalizes across robot embodiments, and trains efficiently. Yet, today's best systems depend on depth sensors, multi-camera rigs, or pre-built maps, limiting the hardware they support and increasing deployment cost. We introduce Robostral Navigate, an 8B vision-language model built around this scalability objective. The model consumes only a stream of monocular RGB images - the most ubiquitous sensor across robotic platforms and predicts waypoints by pointing to the next target location in the current camera view. Operating purely in image space, rather than robot-specific coordinates, makes the policy naturally robust to changes in camera intrinsics and scene scale, enabling deployment across wheeled, legged, and aerial robots without recalibration. We generate 2.4 million trajectories across 350k simulated scenes to reduce the reliance on real-world data collection and scale easily. We further introduce a prefix-caching training recipe that packs entire episodes into single training sequences, reducing training tokens by 22x and cutting training time from months to days. A tree-based attention mask prevents conditioning on previous ground-truth actions, encouraging visually grounded action prediction, and reinforcement learning is used to further improve exploration and recovery capabilities. On the Room-to-Room and Room-Across-Room in Continuous Environments (R2R-CE and RxR-CE) benchmarks, Robostral Navigate sets a new state of the art. On R2R-CE, it achieves a 77.4% success rate, surpassing the best monocular method by 10.5 points and the strongest depth- or multi-camera system by 5.3 points despite using only a single RGB camera. On RxR-CE, it reaches 75.1% success rate, outperforming all monocular baselines.