Robotics: Science and Systems XXII

SuperMap: A Spatio-Temporal SLAM System for Visual-Language Navigation

Shibo Zhao, Guofei Chen, Honghao Zhu, Zhiheng Li, Changwei Yao, Nader Zantout, Seungchan Kim, Wenshan Wang, Ji Zhang, Sebastian Scherer

Abstract:

Robotic navigation in human environments requires a spatio-temporal semantic representation that can reconcile open-vocabulary perception with long-term environmental changes. While foundation models provide strong zero-shot recognition, their predictions are intermittent and view-dependent, and naively integrating them into mapping pipelines leads to identity drift and stale semantics over time. We present SuperMap, a 4D spatio-temporal mapping framework for language-guided navigation that integrates high-frequency geometric SLAM with asynchronous open-vocabulary perception. Our core contribution is a consistency-driven mapping engine that combines 3D-aware instance association/re-activation with a principled existence-and-label confidence update to maintain stable object identities and prune outdated map content under occlusions and scene changes. SuperMap produces a queryable 4D scene-graph representation that interfaces naturally with Vision-Language Models by supporting compositional queries over object semantics, relations, and history. We demonstrate SuperMap on benchmarks and real robots, including dynamic scenes with appearance/disappearance and relocation, and provide ablations and runtime analysis. We release the full system as open-source to provide the community with a deployable baseline for open-vocabulary spatio-temporal mapping.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{ZhaoS-RSS-26, 
    AUTHOR    = {Shibo Zhao AND Guofei Chen AND Honghao Zhu AND Zhiheng Li AND Changwei Yao AND Nader Zantout AND Seungchan Kim AND Wenshan Wang AND Ji Zhang AND Sebastian Scherer}, 
    TITLE     = {{SuperMap: A Spatio-Temporal SLAM System for Visual-Language Navigation}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2026}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Sydney, Australia}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2026.XXII.052} 
}