G2-Nav: Grounded and Guarded Vision-Language Costmaps for Robot Social Navigation

Abstract:Social navigation requires the robot to reason and respond in complex real-world environments. While recent works attempt to incorporate human-level intelligence into robot planning using large Vision-Language Models (VLMs), end-to-end frameworks often create an unpredictable black-box, and existing instruction-following methods are not designed for full autonomy. To bridge this gap, we present G2-Nav, a novel framework that grounds abstract social reasoning and guards safe real-world deployment. Instead of asking the VLM for direct planning decisions, G2-Nav translates its semantic reasoning into a vision-language costmap with reliability and interpretability. The VLM evaluates traversable regions and social agents from open-set perception, mapping social context into the costmap. To improve real-world robustness, the VLM performs semantic verification on upstream tracking, and we introduce a high-frequency safety check to guard against system latency prior to trajectory generation. We demonstrate through real-world experiments that G2-Nav delivers safe, efficient, and socially compliant autonomous navigation in unstructured environments. Code will be made publicly available.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2607.16956 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2607.16956v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.16956 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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