SAFER-Nav: Enhancing Safety for Visual Robot Navigation via Segmentation-Aware Fine-Tuning
arXiv:2606.11636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-based navigation models, particularly foundation models, generate viable trajectories from RGB observations alone. However, even state-of-the-art transformer- and diffusion-based policies struggle to generalize in unfamiliar deployment environments containing unseen obstacles or shifted conditions. The resulting trajectories often remain goal-directed but unsafe. Existing efforts improve safety through external trajectory correction or inte
SAFER-Nav: Enhancing Safety for Visual Robot Navigation via Segmentation-Aware Fine-Tuning
Overview
arXiv:2606.11636v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-based navigation models, particularly foundation models, generate viable trajectories from RGB observations alone. However, even state-of-the-art transformer- and diffusion-based policies struggle to generalize in unfamiliar deployment environments containing unseen obstacles or shifted conditions. The resulting trajectories often remain goal-directed but unsafe. Existing efforts improve safety through external trajectory correction or internal geometric priors, yet the resulting policies are not trained to explicitly represent obstacle boundaries or traversable free-space structure. To address this, we propose a navigation model that incorporates these structures directly into the policy via fine-tuning and is designed to be compatible with diverse RGB-based backbones. Across multiple robot platforms, indoor environments, and static and dynamic obstacle scenarios, our method reduces collision frequency relative to ViNT, NoMaD, and their CARE-augmented variants while maintaining goal-reaching performance.
Source
Originally published at arxiv.org.
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Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11636



