PathPainter: Transferring the Generalization Ability of Image Generation Models to Embodied Navigation

Abstract:Bird's-eye-view (BEV) images have been demonstrated to provide valuable prior information for navigation. Given the global information provided by such views, two key challenges remain: how to fully exploit this information and how to reliably use it during execution. In this paper, we propose a navigation system that uses BEV images as global priors and is designed for ground and near-ground robotic platforms. The system employs an image generation model to interpret human intent from natural language, identify the target destination, and generate traversability masks. During execution, we introduce cross-view localization to align the robot's odometry with the BEV map and mitigate long-term drift in conventional odometry. We conduct extensive benchmark experiments to evaluate the proposed method and further validate its effectiveness on both UAV and quadruped robot platforms. Using only a conventional local motion planner, the quadruped robot successfully completes a 285-meter outdoor long-range navigation task. This work demonstrates how the world-understanding capabilities of foundation models can be transferred to embodied navigation, enabling robots to benefit from the strong generalization ability of existing image generation models.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2605.07496 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2605.07496v3 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.07496 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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