{"ID":2897361,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04686","arxiv_id":"2507.04686","title":"MOSU: Autonomous Long-range Robot Navigation with Multi-modal Scene Understanding","abstract":"We present MOSU, a novel autonomous long-range navigation system that enhances global navigation for mobile robots through multimodal perception and on-road scene understanding. MOSU addresses the outdoor robot navigation challenge by integrating geometric, semantic, and contextual information to ensure comprehensive scene understanding. The system combines GPS and QGIS map-based routing for high-level global path planning and multi-modal trajectory generation for local navigation refinement. For trajectory generation, MOSU leverages multi-modalities: LiDAR-based geometric data for precise obstacle avoidance, image-based semantic segmentation for traversability assessment, and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to capture social context and enable the robot to adhere to social norms in complex environments. This multi-modal integration improves scene understanding and enhances traversability, allowing the robot to adapt to diverse outdoor conditions. We evaluate our system in real-world on-road environments and benchmark it on the GND dataset, achieving a 10% improvement in traversability on navigable terrains while maintaining a comparable navigation distance to existing global navigation methods.","short_abstract":"We present MOSU, a novel autonomous long-range navigation system that enhances global navigation for mobile robots through multimodal perception and on-road scene understanding. MOSU addresses the outdoor robot navigation challenge by integrating geometric, semantic, and contextual information to ensure comprehensive s...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04686","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.04686v1","authors":"[\"Jing Liang\",\"Kasun Weerakoon\",\"Daeun Song\",\"Senthurbavan Kirubaharan\",\"Xuesu Xiao\",\"Dinesh Manocha\"]","published":"2025-07-07T06:08:21Z","proceeding":"cs.RO","tasks":"[\"cs.RO\"]","methods":"[\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}