Sensor-Layout-Agnostic Navigation via Geometric Observation Canonicalization

Abstract:Existing visual navigation policies are inherently bound to fixed camera configurations, creating a fundamental barrier to zero-shot deployment across heterogeneous robot sensor layouts. To overcome this limitation, we present an embodiment-informed navigation policy capable of generalizing across diverse depth sensor configurations on a specific aerial platform. Instead of implicitly learning spatial alignments, our approach explicitly unprojects depth measurements from arbitrary depth sensor payloads, varying in sensor count, mounting extrinsics, and intrinsics, into a shared robot-centric frame, stitching them into a unified spherical range image and a binary validity mask. This mask allows the downstream policy to explicitly distinguish covered space from unobserved blind spots. Trained via reinforcement learning with aggressive camera randomization, our policy generalizes zero-shot to unseen layouts featuring up to seven cameras, scaling success rates from 78% to 95% as total spatial sensing coverage increases. Finally, real-world flight trials on a physical quadrotor, conducted in an obstacle-filled corridor and an outdoor forest, validate the policy's zero-shot transfer across camera configurations and its resilience to sudden online sensor dropouts.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.08306 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.08306v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.08306 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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