InfraVLA: Extending Vision-Language-Action Navigation with Infrastructure Cameras

Abstract:Many indoor environments in which robots operate, such as warehouses, offices, and hospitals, already have cameras installed. They observe parts of the building that the robot cannot see from where it stands, yet navigation policies, including recent vision-language-action (VLA) models, do not use them. We propose InfraVLA, an end-to-end method that adapts a pretrained navigation VLA to such static infrastructure views: a closed-circuit television (CCTV) encoder turns each external view into tokens of the input sequence. Because the views matter only at rare decision points, fine-tuning alone did not make the policy use them in our experiments; we therefore train in two stages, on demonstrations with upsampled counterfactual data and then on recovery data. We evaluate on two simulated warehouse tasks, finding an object named in the instruction and rerouting around blocked aisles, where the deciding information is often visible only to the infrastructure cameras. Tested in distribution, InfraVLA reached a success rate of 100% on both, against 34.0% and 73.6% for a baseline without CCTV input. On out-of-distribution test sets it reached 88.2% and 88.9%. On a real quadruped fine-tuned with under 10 minutes of demonstrations, the policy reached 83.3% against 29.2% for the on-board-only baseline.

8 pages, 6 figures. Submitted to ICRA 2027

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.33647 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.33647v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.33647 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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