PathLift: Depth-Conditioned Metric Lifting for Visual-Navigation Priors

Abstract:Generalist visual-navigation policies tell a robot which direction to go but not how far. A separate lifting step is needed at deployment to convert their unitless trajectory into a metric path that a controller can track; existing scalar lifters apply uniform scaling that misses per-waypoint corrections, while in-policy approaches that inject monocular depth into the policy inherit the prediction errors of the depth model near obstacles and at close range. We present PathLift, a per-waypoint depth-conditioned adapter that lifts a pre-trained visual-navigation policy by consuming an explicit, sensor-grade depth source (RGB-D, stereo, or projected LiDAR) and fitting per-waypoint magnitude and lateral residuals to a canonicalized prior. PathLift consistently improves closed-loop navigation across diverse visual-navigation policies in simulation and on a real wheeled robot under both stereo and LiDAR depth. By turning the policy's unitless intent into a depth-feasible metric path in a single feed-forward pass, the adapter lifts real-world success without test-time optimization.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.16103 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.16103v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.16103 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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