autonomous mobile robot developers

Abstract: Agile and reliable navigation is a core capability for embodied robots navigating complex spatial constraints and dynamic interactions. However, a single policy often struggles to accommodate the distinct decision-making demands of diverse scenarios. We present TAME-Nav, an asymmetric Teacher-Student navigation framework built around a temporal soft mixture of experts (Soft-MoE). The Teacher combines clean observations with causally maintained dynamic-obstacle tracks to construct privileged representations, while the Student learns complementary navigation features from corrupted observation histories through temporal encoding, soft expert routing, and latent distillation. Procedural scenario generation and parallel task-level simulation broaden training coverage, while deployment-informed asymmetric domain randomization supports sim-to-real transfer. Across in-distribution and unseen compositional scenarios, TAME-Nav achieves higher success rates, lower collision rates, and higher navigation scores than representative baselines. On a real quadruped robot, it completes all twenty trials across local-trap escape and narrow-passage navigation with sudden dynamic obstacles, with only one minor contact.

Abstract: Autonomous navigation in previously unseen environments requires effective perception, persistent environmental representation, and collision avoidance while maintaining progress toward a goal. Existing perception-based methods often rely on prior maps or short-horizon observations, limiting their ability to exploit previously observed structure. We propose a memory-aware multi-sensor navigation framework that integrates LiDAR and RGB perception, online distance-field representation learning, and a stage-adaptive Modulated Control Barrier Function Quadratic Program (MCBF-QP). The framework persistently represents static infrastructure while tracking dynamic obstacles, enabling the MCBF-QP controller to exploit previously observed geometry for obstacle circumvention and adapt its safety constraints and guidance to local conditions. Experiments in complex indoor and outdoor environments demonstrate improved navigation efficiency and goal-reaching performance while maintaining collision avoidance in narrow passages and around dynamic obstacles.