Robotics: Science and Systems XXII

OpenFrontier: General Navigation with Visual-Language Grounded Frontiers

Esteban Padilla Cerdio, Boyang Sun, Marc Pollefeys, Hermann Blum

Abstract:

Open-world navigation requires robots to make decisions in complex everyday environments while adapting to flexible task requirements. Conventional navigation approaches often rely on dense 3D reconstruction and hand-crafted goal metrics, which limits their generalization across tasks and environments. Recent advances in vision-language navigation (VLN) and vision-language-action (VLA) models enable end-to-end policies conditioned on natural language, but typically require interactive training, large-scale data collection, or task-specific fine-tuning with a mobile agent. We formulate navigation as a sparse subgoal identification and reaching problem and observe that providing visual anchoring targets for high-level semantic priors enables highly efficient goal-conditioned navigation. Based on this insight, we select navigation frontiers as semantic anchors and propose OpenFrontier, a training-free navigation framework that seamlessly integrates diverse vision-language prior models. OpenFrontier enables efficient navigation with a simple system design, without dense 3D mapping, policy training, or model fine-tuning. We evaluate OpenFrontier across multiple navigation benchmarks and demonstrate strong zero-shot performance, as well as effective real-world deployment on a mobile robot.

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Bibtex:

  
@INPROCEEDINGS{CerdioE-RSS-26, 
    AUTHOR    = {Esteban Padilla Cerdio AND Boyang Sun AND Marc Pollefeys AND Hermann Blum}, 
    TITLE     = {{OpenFrontier: General Navigation with Visual-Language Grounded Frontiers}}, 
    BOOKTITLE = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems}, 
    YEAR      = {2026}, 
    ADDRESS   = {Sydney, Australia}, 
    MONTH     = {July}, 
    DOI       = {10.15607/RSS.2026.XXII.067} 
}