CeDR-Nav: Cross-Embodiment Mapless Navigation via Offline Demonstration Recasting

Abstract:Learning-based methods have demonstrated strong performance in mapless robot navigation. However, a learned policy remains restricted to the embodiment on which it was trained. Many cross-embodiment navigation methods require time-consuming online training and can still underperform target-specific policies. In fact, demonstrations collected on a source embodiment already contain navigation experience that is potentially reusable for deriving a policy for each target embodiment, but the embodiment mismatch prevents these demonstrations from directly serving as valid supervision for the target. In this article, we present CeDR-Nav, a cross-embodiment demonstration recasting framework that trains a dedicated navigation policy for each target embodiment from existing source demonstrations without online data collection. Geometry-consistent scaling with per-demonstration validity assessment converts the source demonstrations into target training data, and a target-specific Gaussian mixture policy generates feasible avoidance maneuvers for each target embodiment. Extensive quantitative simulations and real-world deployments across multiple robot platforms demonstrate the effectiveness of CeDR-Nav, with an average success-rate gain of 13.8 percentage points over DRL-DCLP in cross-embodiment simulations and target-specific policy training completed within seconds.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.13007 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.13007v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.13007 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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