TANGO: Traversability-Aware Navigation with Local Metric Control for Topological Goals
Podgorski, Stefan Garg, Sourav Hosseinzadeh, Mehdi Mares, Lachlan Dayoub, Feras Reid, Ian
Podgorski, Stefan
Garg, Sourav
Hosseinzadeh, Mehdi
Mares, Lachlan
Dayoub, Feras
Reid, Ian
Supervisor
Department
Computer Vision
Embargo End Date
Type
Conference proceeding
Date
2025
License
Language
English
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Research Projects
Organizational Units
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Abstract
Visual navigation in robotics traditionally relies on globally-consistent 3D maps or learned controllers, which can be computationally expensive and difficult to generalize across diverse environments. In this work, we present a novel RGB-only, object-level topometric navigation pipeline that enables zero-shot, long-horizon robot navigation without requiring 3D maps or pre-trained controllers. Our approach integrates global topological path planning with local metric trajectory control, allowing the robot to navigate towards object-level sub-goals while avoiding obstacles. We address key limitations of previous methods by continuously predicting local trajectory using monocular depth and traversability estimation, and in-corporating an auto-switching mechanism that falls back to a baseline controller when necessary. The system operates using foundational models, ensuring open-set applicability without the need for domain-specific fine-tuning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both simulated environments and real-world tests, highlighting its robustness and deployability. Our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods, offering a more adaptable and effective solution for visual navigation in open-set environments. The source code is made publicly available: https://github.com/podgorki/TANGO.
Citation
S. Podgorski, S. Garg, M. Hosseinzadeh, L. Mares, F. Dayoub and I. Reid, "TANGO: Traversability-Aware Navigation with Local Metric Control for Topological Goals," 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Atlanta, GA, USA, 2025, pp. 2399-2406, doi: 10.1109/ICRA55743.2025.11127998.
Source
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Conference
2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Keywords
Measurement, Visualization, Image Segmentation, Three-Dimensional Displays, Navigation, Source Coding, Pipelines, Trajectory, Planning, Robots
Subjects
Source
2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Publisher
IEEE