Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation

Why it matters (2 min)

• Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires a robot to locate a target object in a previously unseen environment without relying on pre-built maps or task-specific training.
• However, existing ZSON methods often struggle in realistic and cluttered environments, particularly when the scene contains heavy occlusions, unknown risks, or dynamically moving target objects.
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Context

Zero-shot object navigation (ZSON) requires a robot to locate a target object in a previously unseen environment without relying on pre-built maps or task-specific training. However, existing ZSON methods often struggle in realistic and cluttered environments, particularly when the scene contains heavy occlusions, unknown risks, or dynamically moving target objects. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{Schrödinger's Navigator}, a navigation framework inspired by Schrödinger's thought experiment on uncertainty. The framework treats unobserved space as a set of plausible future worlds and reasons over them before acting. Conditioned on egocentric visual inputs and three candidate trajectories, a trajectory-conditioned 3D world model imagines future observations along each path. This enables the agent to see beyond occlusions and anticipate risks in unseen regions without requiring extra detours or dense global mapping. The imagined 3D observations are fused into the navigation map and used to update a value map. These updates guide the policy toward trajectories that avoid occlusions, reduce exposure to uncertain space, and better track moving targets. Experiments on a…

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Receipts

1. Schrödinger's Navigator: Imagining an Ensemble of Futures for Zero-Shot Object Navigation (arXiv cs.AI)